Chennai: Nostalgia consumes 58-year-old Paul Rodriquez when asked about a nondescript playground located on Gandhi Road in Velachery. Rodriquez, who hardly looks his age, still boots up on weekends to kick a football around with teenagers from the locality and has no plans to retire his passion for the game yet. Unfortunately, the state government took that decision for him when it decided that a Taluk office will come up on this playground, bursting the bubble on young hopefuls and blistering the memories of old timers.
“What is happening here is a systematic takeover of a recreational space gifted to the Adi Dravida community, who were the early settlers in this place, by former Chief Minister K. Kamaraj,” Rodriquez explains. But for it to be taken over for construction, the playground never once went out of favour. Instead, all that happens is dust-kicking action that is worthy enough for residents in adjacent buildings to watch and applaud while sipping over a cup of tea on a bright Sunday morning.
C. Manivannan (53), who is a former volleyball player, reels out name after name of local sporting legends, which only serves to establish how immensely proud the residents are, of both Velachery’s sporting culture as well as the ground’s role in helping build it up.
The playground used to be bigger than its current size. To their credit, the residents helped accommodate a 24/7 maternity hospital and a community centre on the ground by giving up space as these were considered essential facilities that would benefit the wider public.
“The hospital was opened in 1994 and the community hall in 1999. For the last five years though, neither facility has been accessible to the public. The hospital was shut down and moved to Adyar, the community hall is used to stock government freebies,” said S. Arunath, a member of the area’s hockey club, pointing to a colour television and mixer grinder seen stocked inside the building.
What has irked the residents is that the government conducted bhoomi puja before the construction, after they spent out of their own pocket to level the ground and make better use of the remaining space in order to be able to play hockey and football side-by-side.
“In the process, the authorities also destroyed a urinal that we had built for the sports persons to use and dumped the debris into an open well on the ground, which was a drinking water source for the entire locality not long ago,” remarked E. Selvakumar, co-ordinator of the Velachery Friends Sports Club, under whose aegis training is imparted to local youth in sports like football and hockey etc., at this ground.
Unfortunately, the residents are resigned to their fate as a few told DC that they have been privately intimated by local police officers that construction work is to begin soon. Not that the residents did not make an attempt to salvage their history as S. Pugazhendi Selvan, the secretary of the sports club, told DC that they had approached Chennai Mayor Saidai S. Duraisamy.
“He contacted someone over the phone in front of us and we heard him say that he will identify an alternate land or even give up some of his own land but that they should immediately drop the plans to construct on the playground. Two days after this, the government conducted the bhoomi puja on the ground,” he said. Duraisamy could not be reached for comment.
But it is as Mogul Mohammed Muneer, a local resident who is also a technical director with the International Hockey Federation (FIH) reiterated, the locals are not demanding anything from the government, which they were keen to say has done incredibly beneficial things for sports persons. They only want their playground as it is now, left undisturbed.
“We don’t want the future generation to sit on walls, smoke up joints and ruin their lives. Already, the younger ones at home complain when we ask them to go out and play that there is no space to do that. As long as this ground exists, no matter the history, the next generation can still look forward to going out there in the open and just play,” Muneer said.
