Chennai: Can you imagine Chennai without its Marina beach? That might be a bit like staging Macbeth without Banquo's ghost or Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark. The world’s longest natural urban beach is part of the city’s folklore and it's the greatest open space that is fully accessible to the public. Any citizen of Chennai would pride himself on his city's beach and while guiding a visitor around the city would point out the white sands as if they were pearls the sea had brought in.
Annie Besant had this to say of the Marina boulevard — “In keeping with her dignity as a progressive city with a population of over half a million souls, (its) delectable evening resort, Marina Beach will be converted into being ‘a thing of beauty and joy forever’.
First, the beach was given a promenade by Governor, Mountstuart Elephinstone Grant Duff, in 1884 and then it progressed in over 130 years until it stands today as the finest public lung space attracting as many as 1.5 lakh visitors on Kannum Pongal day, which is now just a month away.
There has been a lot of chatter about the not-so-clean state of the sands. The privileged few, who were lucky to be born decades ago and enjoyed a more pristine beach in their childhood, would even go so far as to claim that the beach should be fenced off so that it is not spoilt by the ‘Great Indian Trash’ habit of simply chucking waste away instead of binning it.
Of course, the same Indian would go a couple of hundred metres to find a bin in Singapore because of the fear psychosis of a threatened fine over throwing waste. The silly suggestion of a fenced-off beach is anathema to an open Chennai society that has one great institution to offer all its visitors.
Not one person who has lived his formative years in Madras / Chennai can claim not to have had his life touched in some way by the Marina beach. A first stroke at cricket was probably attempted on its sands, a teenage love story may have blossomed there as even Cupid would have been seduced by the setting of sea and sand and, for early risers, the sun coming up from the eastern horizon.
The green ‘manga’ slice with salt and chilli powder from the stalls or the food from Triplicane's children who had to flog their family’s sundal on an evening to buttress the joint income, the Rita ice cream push cart from a very old factory in the city and roasted corn burning on a coal fire in a wagon are just a few of the vast variety of food available. The new lighthouse on the entrance to the beach now allows visitors too, making the area even more attractive and user-friendly.
The best way to tackle the trash left behind every day is to have it swept up and a city corporation that takes so much pride must not stint on expenditure on man and machines to clean the beach on a daily basis. The democratic thing to do would be to preserve this 3.1 kms stretch from the Cooum to the lighthouse, which draws the most visitors, in the best possible condition.
The city must adapt its beach as its finest advertisement and keep it in such shape that there can be no complaints from the snooty or the high and mighty about how common it is. The place has too much history to it for us to neglect a legacy that is a boon to the city from nature.
