Back on the tourist trail: The hotel where women were raped and tortured

A Bosnian hotel where terrible crimes were committed by Serb paramilitaries is at the centre of conflict between survivors who want a memorial and those who would rather forget, writes Emma Graham-Harrison in the Guardian. Read on:

The TripAdvisor reviews for Vilina Vlas spa hotel are mixed. Only a couple mention the rape camp it once was – and if you do not speak French or German you would miss them. The rest are a mix of mundane complaints about dirty rooms, and enthusiastic tributes to the forest and its natural hot springs.

The hotel also features on the tourist website for historic Višegrad town, and older editions of the only guidebook to Bosnia-Herzegovina by Bradt. So unsuspecting guests travelling through Višegrad can – and do – book into a building used for murder, rape and torture by a sadistic paramilitary group less than 25 years ago.

And though the mattresses may have been changed, and the walls repainted, the bed frames that tourists sleep on today are the same ones on which dozens of women were attacked. The dated lobby is floored with the same stone that in 1992 had to be hosed clean of blood, and visitors using the swimming pool splash around in what was a killing ground.

“People who go there don’t know they are staying in beds where women were raped, and swimming in a pool in which people were executed,” said Bakira Hasečić, a native of Višegrad who established and now runs the Association of Women Victims of War.

In 1992 Vilina Vlas was commandeered as a headquarters by Milan Lukić, the sadistic leader of the Serb paramilitary group the White Eagles, which in a few months turned Višegrad into a charnel house and virtually emptied it of its Muslim population.

After years on the run, including some in Latin America, Lukić was captured, tried in the international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia at The Hague and sentenced to life imprisonment for war crimes including murder, cruelty, persecution and other crimes against humanity.

A room in Vilina Vlas hotel. The spa resort is little changed since 1992 when dozens of muslim women were imprisoned and raped there. Photograph: David Gill for the Observer

While the war was horrific enough, the peace that followed brought new torment for the victims of Vilina Vlas. Hotel business resumed at the squat, red-roofed building: the rape camp was returned to use for tourists without even a change of furniture – much less a memorial.

Višegrad town is now run by people apparently bent on not only forgetting the campaign of death that transformed their town from one with a Muslim majority to one heavily dominated by ethnic Serbs, but erasing any trace that any of it ever happened.

Despite pages of testimony at the international court in the Hague, and a judgment that confirmed it was used as a rape centre, Višegrad’s mayor, Mladen Djurevic, denies ever having heard of rape, torture, or murder at Vilina Vlas.

“I don’t know what happened there,” he said. “I am not interested in going back to the past. Why would I read about that if I’m not interested in going back to that?”

His offices suggest his disdain for history is selective. They sit at the heart of Andrićgrad, a tourist-trap pastiche of a traditional Serbian town, recently built in tribute to Višegrad’s most famous son, Nobel-prize winning author Ivo Andrić.

 A memorial to the dead with the word ‘genocide’ reinstated by survivors. Photograph: David Gill for the Observer

Previous administrations have poured millions of euros into building this memorial to an imagined past, while doing their best to destroy evidence, in some cases, of painful recent events. For years they have tried to demolish the ruins of a house where 59 Muslim civilians were burned alive, issuing demolition orders to make way for a superfluous drainage pipe and then a road to nowhere.

In the town’s Muslim graveyard, swollen by graves from 1992, authorities ordered the word “genocide” to be chiselled off a memorial to the dead, then sent in a team of workers to get rid of it. Survivors responded by painting it back in blunt, black letters so they stood out more dramatically.

And at Vilina Vlas, after blocking a memorial and ignoring calls for the hotel to be pulled down – or at least remodelled – the local government instead poured money into repaving the road to the hotel and starting work on an expansion to add a “luxury” floor.

“I personally don’t think we should demolish anything. We should refurbish and expand,” said Djurevic when asked about calls by some victims for the hotel to be pulled down. Dwelling on the past stopped a town from moving forward, he added.

One of the strongest voices against this official campaign of forgetting has been Hasečić, a survivor of both sexual violence and the ethnic cleansing campaign partly run from the spa.

In 1992 she lived just a few miles down the road from the hotel and watched as it swallowed friends and neighbours. “No one knows exact numbers – we think around 200 women were taken through, based on testimony from survivors,” she said.

Word of the horrors began seeping out as a few of the men and women taken to Vilina Vlas – usually for murder and rape respectively – escaped or were rescued, often by Serb friends who managed to prise them away from their captors.

At least one girl who Hasečić knew, Jasmina Ahmetspahic, committed suicide by jumping from a balcony. Another was freed after the intervention of a Serbian friend but returned “her lips scratched, with a fever, shaking so much she couldn’t hold a cup of milk”.

Later, when she had escaped to relative safety, Hasečić began collecting more details about what had happened there. Much of it was confirmed as accurate years later in the trial of Lukić and his aides at The Hague, even though he was not charged with sexual violence.

“There was ample evidence about a large number of rapes, murder and other serious crimes being committed at the Vilina Vlas hotel,” said Dermot Groome, who led the prosecution of Lukić at The Hague, and is now a professor at Penn State Dickinson Law University, US.

The Serbian war criminal Milan Lukic in 1992 Photograph: AFP

Groome, a former sex-crime prosecutor in Manhattan, who also led the investigation of Slobodan Milosevic’s crimes in Bosnia, said the women tortured and abused at the hotel were “some of the most traumatised people I had ever encountered in my work as a prosecutor”.

None of them wanted to cooperate in a prosecution for sexual violence when initially contacted, because of their fears about appearing in court. However, the trial ended up hingeing on their testimony, as the rape survivors who had known Lukić in childhood played a critical role in dismantling his claim that he was not in Višegrad at the time of other attacks.

“To rebut his alibi, I needed to introduce a great deal of evidence of his sex crimes – evidence that would be sufficient to prove beyond reasonable doubt that he committed these rapes, and therefore was in Višegrad to commit the charged crimes,” Groome said.

Nerma Jelacic, a deputy director of the Commission for International Justice and Accountability, whose family is from Višegrad, said the aggressive refusal of the authorities in the town, and many of the ordinary Serbs who lived there, to even acknowledge these crimes was a fresh trauma for survivors, but also damaging to any longterm hopes of rebuilding.

Rape survivor Bakira Hasečić, who now campaigns on behalf of other female victims of the war. Photograph: David Gill for the Observer

“You have whole generations who have been raised with this denial – this systematic denial of the undeniable,” she said. “This has become another way of waging a war.”

Tragedy mingles with hope on the streets of nearby Sarajevo, where there are constant reminders of past horrors – from the “Sarajevo roses” etched in the streets by mortar rounds to the museums about the war – but also a sense that people who were victims are rebuilding their lives.

But Višegrad feels much more sinister, a town where streets are still half-empty from the ethnic cleansing of 1992, while Serbs who benefited from it or moved in deny the reality around them. Djurevic was happy to lament Višegrad’s shrinking population, while at the same time ready to attack the campaigns to remember the bloody events that drove most Muslims away. “Until the early 1990s we had around 25,000 citizens, and currently the population is half of that,” he said.

In 1991 there were about 23,000 people living in Višegrad, two-thirds of them Muslim. The most recent 2013 census found the population had fallen to less than half that, and barely 10% of them are Muslims.

Among the few who have come back is Bilal Memišević, who left a well-paid job in Dubai to grapple with the complex politics of Višegrad. He survived because he was studying abroad in 1992, but his parents were killed; he says he came home to honour their memory.

“My parents paid the highest possible price for Višegrad, so I had a moral obligation to go back and continue our family line, on our family land – and I succeeded in that,” he said.

Now he farms and breeds horses and is the only Muslim member of the municipal assembly. But he wishes more Muslim people would join him. “We have a problem that there are very few of us,” he said.

Vilina Vlas on TripAdvisor

He considers Vilina Vlas a “terrible kind of place” and was part of a civil society initiative to have a commemorative plaque put on the building. “You could prevent a future crime by telling about the terrible things that happened,” he says. But he doesn’t want the building torn down.

Historic hammams, or bathhouses, in the hotel grounds dated back to Ottoman times and had never been used for murder, he said. And the hotel was important to the town’s economy, employing about 70 people.

“I deal with the past in a certain way, because I want people who come back to Višegrad to have a future,” he says. “Rationally, you can’t blame buildings. It’s the ideology that needs to be changed. If you say we have to destroy the spa, by that logic you have to destroy half of Bosnia.”

Over 50 scary images depicting filth of Varanasi and River Ganges that went viral in China

In 2008, about 50 images posted with a first-hand account of a visitor who had spent a few months in India, had gone viral in China. Many Chinese forums and columns published them.  The images are disturbing, but not for the government and Indian people except some activists and NGOs.

Surprisingly, the images  depicting ugly side of India did improve sanitation condition in China. China has its own flaws, but it can’t be denied that Indian aren’t treating scared river as it should be. On the other hand, Indians don’t mind such embarrassment or they don’t actually know how India is perceived by rest of the world.

India enjoys an image of ancient civilization with spiritual values. There is no country in the world like India when it comes to cultural and social diversity. Tourist are nuts for places like Varanasi. Every state has something unique to offer to tourists. From Himalayas in the north to the costs in the south, from billion dollar buildings to poverty stricken slums, India makes a perfect destination for those who seek exposure to world’s biggest and successful democracy.

But India and Indians are ridiculed and embarrassed by other nations for its filth and religious hypocrisy. The River Ganges is considered holiest river for Hindus, and also most polluted. Despite being so sacred, there is nothing that is not dumped into the river. Raw sewage, plastic bags and bottles, industrial effluents, human waste, chemical from tanneries, discarded idols, cow dung, partially cremated corpses, flower-garlands, human remains, animal carcasses, butcher’s offal, chemical dyes from sari factories and construction waste, everything ends up in River Ganges. Daily, people defecate on the banks of this sacred river, while many others come long way to take bath in the same water.

The condition hasn’t changed much in 2015. In January 2015, more than 100 corpses, including children, were found washed up in shallow tributary of the River Ganges. The bodies were decaying and dogs and birds could be seen feeding on them. About 102 bodies were spotted near the village Pariyar, in Uttar Pradesh. All credit goes to India’s custom to give water burial. Many people do it because they can’t afford proper cremation.

(Source: Planet Custodian)

Crows are doing the best they can

It’s time to give these resourceful, community-minded creatures some credit, writes Elaine Godfrey in the Atlantic. Read on: 

The first thing to know about crows is that a group of them is called a murder.

In America, crows count as a Halloween decoration, like skeletons and mini-gravestones. Homeowners perch plastic ones in their trees to instill fear in passersby. People in many cultures consider the crow to be an omen, a harbinger of war and death. In Islamic hadith, reports about Muhammad’s sayings and practices, crows are one of the five animals “for which there is no blame on the one who kills them.” On the Faroe Islands, virginal women once had to throw a stone, a bone, and a clump of dirt at a crow for some reason. Farmers literally erect mannequins in their fields to scare them.

Can we give crows a break?

The world’s treatment of crows is grossly unfair. When I was a kid, my parents told me about their friend Linda, an elementary-school teacher in Illinois. One day, Linda and her class decided to adopt a zoo animal as a service project. When she was reading to them from a list of available animal adoptees, “crow” came up as an option. “Who would want a stupid old crow?” one little boy asked. The class adopted a polar bear instead.

When I heard this story as a child, it devastated me. I knew what it was like to get picked last. I would feel a pang of pity whenever I saw a crow perched on the power lines behind my house or pecking through the yard. Stupid old crow, I would say to myself sadly. But in fact, crows are not stupid. That little boy in Illinois can eat crow—because these birds are really, really smart.

Crows, along with magpies, jays, and ravens, are members of the family Corvidae, a group known for two things: exhibiting complex behaviors, and having massive brains. A New Caledonian crow named Betty once made a TED Talk audience go bananas by bending a wire to make a hook. And researchers believe the Hawaiian crow is likely to have the same talent.

“One of the reasons I got so excited by them was because hooked-tool use is something that only New Caledonian crows and ourselves have invented,” said Alex Taylor, a senior lecturer in psychology at the University of Auckland. “The great apes haven’t invented using hooks, and [humans] only invented using hooks probably around 100,000 years ago. It’s possible that crows beat us to that bit of technology.” Taylor says the birds have a high encephalization quotient, which means their brains are really big for their bodies. The crows he works with aren’t spooky; they’re observant: “Basically it feels like you’re constantly being observed and assessed,” Taylor says. “You’re dealing with a very smart and watchful animal.”

Kevin McGowan, an ornithologist at the Cornell Lab in New York, told me that the crow’s spooky reputation is pretty unwarranted. “It’s because they’re black and they’re scavengers,” McGowan said. Their bad rap started in northern Europe, where there are no vultures, so ravens and crows were always the first to show up to snack on animal carcasses. When Europeans came to North America, they brought their crow prejudice with them. “That whole combination of being near death, not having a very pretty song, that was all a big negative stigma for these guys to overcome.” He also wishes The Birds had never been made.

“Crows are beautiful,” McGowan says. “A big adult in the sunshine is beautiful, the way the light shines off their wings ... They’re just a really nice-looking bird.”

But sometimes crows are victims of mistaken identity. Grackles look like crows, except they are smaller and shinier, more of an iridescent purple. They bully other birds at feeders, and they can damage crops. They also make a horrible sound, like a screen door closing, or a rusty gate swinging open. Grackles are the birds that you hear and you think ugh. Crows, though. Crows are matte black, and they make a sharp, clear caw caw. Ravens, like the one who barges into the chamber in the Edgar Allan Poe poem, are also not crows. They are much larger, roughly the size of a red-tailed hawk.

“They’re not evil birds. They’re just trying to make their way and do the best they can.”
While humans might sometimes conflate crows with their avian relatives, research shows that crows rarely forget a face. John Marzluff, a wildlife biologist at the University of Washington, once conducted an experiment with two masks—a “dangerous” mask and a “neutral” mask. His assistants wore the dangerous mask to capture and band several crows, and for months afterward, he and his students wore both disguises around campus: The ones in the dangerous masks were repeatedly scolded by crows, while the ones in neutral masks were left alone. The crows also appeared to warn their friends of the danger at hand.

They have “great family values,” McGowan told WBUR in 2015. “They do neighborhood watch. They help each other out.” McGowan said. “They are very interested in working together to make the world a safer place for other crows.”

Kaeli Swift, a Ph.D. student at the University of Washington, researches crow “funerals.” On her blog Corvid Research, Swift writes that crows “appear to respond strongly once they discover a dead member of their own species.” They use death as a teachable moment, gathering around their fallen comrades in an attempt to identify potential threats. It’s something only a handful of nonhuman animals do.

And they can be generous gift givers, too: In 2015, an 8-year-old girl in Seattle named Gabi Mann started feeding her neighborhood crows scraps of food. In return, they left her dozens of little tokens—buttons and paper clips and pieces of colored glass. Gabi told the BBC that her favorite gift from the crows was a tiny heart charm. “It's showing me how much they love me,” she said.

It’s high time we give these resourceful, community-minded creatures some love in return. McGowan, who has spent more than 30 years studying and teaching people about crows, says he’s working to do just that. “I do try to tell people they’re not evil birds,” he said. “They’re just trying to make their way and do the best they can.” He tells me that this year at the Cornell Lab, the tagging color is orange, which means every crow identified by his team will get a little pumpkin-colored tag pinned to its wing. “It looks real nice, the orange with the black feathers,” McGowan says. “It looks really nice.”

10 vintage photos of Arab leaders as children

The men mentioned below are universally known as some of the most powerful individuals in the Arab world.

Unsurprisingly, the Middle East is notable for its long history of civilizations, revolutions, both bloody and bloodless coups, and of course … for its leaders.

Ever wondered what Arab leaders looked like as children? This post is for you!

1. Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan (1918-2004)

Sheikh Zayed was born in Al Ain, United Arab Emirates, in 1918 and was raised as a desert nomad. He was the youngest of the four sons of Sheikh Sultan bin Zayed Al Nahyan, the emir who ruled Abu Dhabi from 1922 to 1926.

The beloved leader, known to his people as Baba Zayed, served as the first president of the UAE from 1971 to 2004 and ruler of Abu Dhabi from 1966 to 2004. He is widely renowned for raising the living standard and modernizing his country as well as making it one of the most prosperous countries in the region.

2. Gamal Abdel Nasser (1918-1970)

Alexandria, Egypt. He served as the second President of Egypt from 1956 until his death in 1970.

Before becoming a president, Nasser was recognized for leading the Free Officers in staging an almost bloodless coup d’état to overthrow the monarchy on July 23, 1952. Furthermore, young Nasser took part in many anti-British street demonstrations. In one of them, he received a blow on the forehead that left a lifelong scar.

After graduating from secondary school, he went to a law college for several months after which he joined the Royal Egyptian Military Academy, graduating as a second lieutenant.

3. Yasser Arafat (1929-2004)

Yasser Arafat was born to a Palestinian family in Cairo, Egypt in 1929. His father hailed from Gaza city and his mother was from Jerusalem. During the Arab–Israeli war in 1948, Arafat left university and, along with other youths, he volunteered to join Arab forces fighting against Israeli troops.

In 1950, Arafat graduated with a bachelor's degree in civil engineering from the University of Cairo. Arafat was the President of the Palestinian Authority (PA) from 1996 until his death in 2004.

He was also a founding member of Fatah and served as the chairman of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) for more than three decades. In 1993 he led the PLO to a peace agreement with the Israeli government after which he was jointly awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace along with his Israeli counterparts.

4. Saddam Hussein (1937-2006)

Saddam Hussein Al-Tikriti was born to a poor family in the Iraqi town of Al-Awja, near Tikrit. He served as the President of Iraq from July 16, 1979, until April 9, 2003.

Young Saddam joined the Ba'ath Party in 1957 and played a key role in the 1968 coup that brought the Ba'ath party to power in Iraq.

As an Iraqi president, he was notorious for engaging his country in two wars with both Iran and Kuwait, and for brutally suppressing uprisings of religious minorities and Kurds.

5. Sultan Qaboos bin Said

Sultan Qaboos bin Said was born in Salalah, Oman, in 1940. He was the only son of the then-ruler of the country, Sultan Said bin Taimur.

Qaboos, a member of Oman’s Al Bu Said dynasty, was educated in Salalah and Pune, India. At the age of 16, he was sent to England to pursue his higher education.

In 1970 Qaboos became the new ruler of Oman after he overthrew his father and exiled him to London. He paved the way for an ambitious social and economic reform. Sultan Qaboos is also widely respected for ending Oman’s isolation by joining the Arab League and the United Nations.

6. Rafiq Al Hariri (1944-2005)

Rafiq Al Hariri was born in 1944 to a poor family in the southern port of Sidon. In his later years, Hariri, the influential Lebanese businessman and politician, served as the as prime minister of Lebanon twice; from 1992 to 1998; and from 2000 until his resignation in 2004.

His reign was instrumental in rebuilding the country after its civil war. His assassination in 2005 fomented political tensions between Lebanon and Syria.

7. Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum

Sheikh Mohammed was born in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, in 1949, being the third of Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum's four sons.

Sheikh Mohammed was appointed as Minister of Defense in December 1971. He also served as the Crown Prince of Dubai from 1995 until he became the new Ruler of Dubai as well as the Vice President and Prime Minister of the UAE in 2006. The popular leader is also known for his poetry and interest in the equestrian sport.

8. Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi

The current president of Egypt, Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi was born in Cairo, Egypt in 1954. The Egyptian military officer became the country's de facto leader in July 2013, after the country’s armed forces overthrew Mohammed Morsi following mass protests against his rule.

Adly Mansour was appointed as the interim president until Sisi was formally elected as president in May 2014.

9. King Abdullah II of Jordan

Abdullah ibn Al Hussein was born in Amman, Jordan, in 1962. He has been serving as the King of Jordan since 1999. Abdullah, the eldest son of King Hussein, is a member of the Hashemite dynasty, the direct Arab descendants of Prophet Muhammad.

10. Bashar Al Assad

Bashar Al Assad was born in 1965 in Damascus, Syria. He was the third child of Ḥafiz Al Assad, a Syrian air force military officer and member of the Ba'ath Party. In 2000, Bashar Al-Assad succeeded his father and became the President of Syria at the age of 34.

Contrary to the early hopes that his presidency would mark an era of major political and economic reform and revival, Bashar largely followed the steps of his father’s authoritarian style of governance.

In 2011, Assad faced a major uprising in Syria that evolved into a brutal civil war that has yet to come to an end.

(Source: Step Feed)

Madras is an emotion: A north Indian writes on falling in love with Chennai

As a north Indian, Chennai was new to me but the discoveries I made about the place surprised me, writes Prateek Sharma in TNM. Read on:

I remember sitting in the Tamil Nadu Express on my first ride to Chennai, sharing my seat with an anxious Delhi couple going to ‘settle’ there with a job transfer in hand. Their gloomy faces were quite clear and the conversation involved every possible stereotypical letdown a north Indian can make of ‘living in the south.’ Having been with diverse people for most of my life, I should have been immune to those discussions, but somehow, I found myself in a similar spot.

I belong to the state of Madhya Pradesh (MP) and had finished a year of life in Punjab before coming to Chennai in 2016. On paper, I was an outsider myself. Apart from the image of the south that the north believes in, I had no idea how life worked in the state of Tamil Nadu. I was ignorant of the presence of Dravidian politics, didn’t know that films like Kanchivaram, Aval Appadithan, and Anbe Sivam existed, and had never eaten kuzhambu in my life.

But, in my one year stay in the city, which involved discovering its politics, cinema, and food, I learned something valuable about the people of Chennai and my place amongst them.

If you Google ‘why south Indians’, an array of search results will take you to riled up Quora and Reddit discussions asking ‘Why south Indians hate north Indians?’ This reflects the phobia of becoming victim to communal oppression, seen in the north, that many of us north Indians carry.

In my stay in the city, I made many discoveries. For starters, I discovered that Tamil has a complex tongue roll in the end and is pronounced ‘Tamizh’ and Dosa is ‘Dosai’. Perhaps the first two things that you might learn among the many discoveries that come later. While “I love Sambhar” is the first thing any Tamilian will hear in the north after people find out that the person is from TN, I was surprised nobody said “I love Poha” to me. Probably, because they don’t care.

I did not find myself to be in a minority here. I am not saying this to underline the city’s cosmopolitan nature which may have made it easy for me to seek the company of fellow north Indians. I am saying this based on the understanding that the city extended to me, acknowledging where I come from.

I was here for a year of internship and work, and Chennai was also a center for the entrance exams I was giving. At one such exam, before entering the premises, the gatekeeper gave us some mundane instructions (like no phones, papers etc.) in Tamil but asked if any of us were non-Tamilians. Two hands, including mine, went up among hundreds. Though the instructions weren’t unfamiliar for any student appearing for an exam, the man still used some broken Hindi to translate them for us.

I was nodding with an I-get-it smile on my face while having an epiphany about what had just happened. What that person was giving me was the space to exercise my individuality, which would have been non-existent if the sides were switched. The dominance north Indians hold in the geographical spectrum is enough to give them a sense of entitlement, tossing as they do imaginary terms like ‘national language’ and then feeling cornered when they find others countering it.

For a non-Tamilian, the language is as hard to learn as any language is for a non-native. But it was only a matter of few months that my ‘Arey’ changed into ‘Aiyo’ and my ‘Oye’ to ‘Dei’. Then comes the time when you find yourself mouthing songs that you would have never imagined yourself singing and one day you’re watching a Tamil film and do not feel the need to have subtitles. It’s not that I had moderately mastered the language, it’s just that I was comfortable with its presence.

Where a Delhi person is able to figure out Punjabi or Guajarati with a sense of familiarity, languages spoken in the south become a pack of gibberish for him/her that represents all the states.

But it’s not the elites here who respect cultural boundaries and don’t harbour a sense of entitlement, it’s the working class population you encounter every day which, instead of asking you to learn Tamil and come, works with you. From cab drivers to bus conductors and from the person behind the cash counter in a grocery store to Kaveri aunty who works at our house and responds to my “Mudichitingala?” with a “hogaya!” (done) after finishing her work, inclusivity is more of a behavioural trait rather than an objective.

Conversations over drinks with people from all walks of life invited me to a range of lessons because in the south, it’s more likely for any sitting over sarakku to get political, and not from a debating point of view. Sometimes, it might only involve a bonding over the criticism of the Modi wave trying to penetrate TN and will end with laughing over memes that show how the BJP is failing to do so. It speaks about a collective ideological unity that TN has always tried to maintain in order to prevent the hegemony from breaking it.

Being an ‘outsider’, it is easier for me to observe that because I can be familiar to people here as much as I can, but I can never let go of the north Indian persona that I carry. Being the odd-one-out in any group would be a kindle enough to start a conversation over differences but they sound very different from the conversations we have in the north. They reflect an intellect and sophistication which go beyond the stereotype that all south Indians are “cultural” and educated.

“We can adapt to adjust but we can’t adjust to adapt,” said an acquaintance explaining that though it’s only fair to be inclusive and adjust with someone who is feeling out of place, what Tamilians cannot tolerate is when that inclusiveness is imposed.

It isn’t as if Chennai is flawless through the social lens. It has its fair share of grave misogyny, casteism and sexism just like any other part of India but its fight against them is quite strong, too. This is what I felt sitting in a full-house at Kamaraj Memorial Hall as the riveting performance of the play, ‘Manjal’ took each viewer to the edge of their seat. The play autopsied the systemic evil of manual scavenging from every angle possible and I had never been so thrilled by a crowd so impassioned.

Where ‘South ki movies’ is a famous laughing stock in the North, the films I saw in Chennai had the kind of richness and talent in their creation which can put a lot of Hindi goodies to shame. The city has an active culture of public screenings where people find time to get together and discuss indies and documentaries which are applauded worldwide.

Every now and then, I do find myself flitting between Hindi films, Punjabi songs and the various north Indian eateries in the city only to regulate my homesickness. I can’t say that I don’t miss it, but not for the wrong reasons.

Coming back to Chennai via Central involves an auto ride that takes me through Marina beach which now feels like a ‘welcome home’ sign. The sensation is quite bittersweet because you are estranged to your native place and have become more and more familiar with the new one. But the thing about Chennai is, it doesn’t confine you into its massive built, and rather lets you be who you want to be.