Madras Hoardings
Two days back we were bombarded with news headlines like Supreme Court bans hoardings in Chennai". I leapt up in joy and threw the paper I was reading into the air. All was not lost, after all. There was hope.

It was not until the next morning that it became apparent that *illegal*/unlicensed hoardings have been "banned". At which point I realized I had just learned something new - that "illegal" and "banned" are distinct things. As it turns out you have to take the permission of Corporation of Chennai before putting up a hoarding; and it was just that some 10,000 hoardings had come up in Madras without bothering with such procedural hassles. The current ruling would bring down such unauthorized erections.

So, looks like this is not the end of the tyranny of hoardings - the mother of all urban eyesores, the veils of steel pushing architectural elegance of the urban landscape to the background . ... The corporation wants a cut in the business, folks. Nothing more, nothing less. At any rate, there is some temporary respite, and there were some interesting sights as I drove to office yesterday.

I saw building exteriors I had never before:



And I did not shed a tear when I saw premium hoarding real estate lie in tatters. A friend in the ad industry once told me the hoarding shown below (near Anna flyover) was the most expensive in the city. The Rediff ad must have come up during the dot com boom, no doubt :)