~~ The hell in OMR ~~. Review on Chennai

Chennai has always been a strange city. It always has 2 sides to it. If you feel students get great exposure in this metropolitan city, on the other side your child could also learn all the bad things that you yourself might not know! If you think ‘local’ tamil @ Chennai tamil is the language here in this place, you will be surprised when the auto driver speak such fluent English. Take anything in Chennai; there is always a good and bad side.

One more in that list is the ECR and the OMR. If ECR (East Coast Road) leads to bliss; the OMR (Old Mahabalipuram Road) leads to hell. Both these roads run parallel and lead to a same place – Mahabalipuram. ECR is a scenic beachway, with well laid out road and reasonably well maintained. Its counter part though, gives me all the horrible experiences.

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This review is not about Chennai, not the roads, or not even the traffic conditions on the road. I had to fit this review somewhere here in MS, as I wanted to write about it badly. Guess this is the best place where this one fits.

By the way, what is this review about?

Brutal murder of cattle on the OMR

> Play >

The OMR boasts of being the IT highway. Start at tidel park you will see all software giants on this road on both sides – CTS, Wipro, Satyam, Accenture, Infosys, Polaris, TCS and many more. This has prompted the government to make this road better and it started a huge project to convert this road to a 6-lane highway. The result is that there is construction going on everywhere and you happen to do a sine curve riding across the divider, with all those diversions. And there are so many road accidents daily.

Forget the humans, they have 6 senses and they should be sensible enough to drive slow and avoid accidents (Still accidents do happen, how much ever careful you are, but I do not wish to speak on that now). My concern is on the cattle that roam about on the OMR. I travel a 20 km stretch on the OMR and if I don’t see cattle every 3 minutes of my journey that would appear strange. Just as humans get killed in accidents, these cattle too get slaughtered on the OMR by speeding vehicles. I pity these creatures. I am not able to understand what these cattle do on the road? The owner of these let them roam on road and leave them uncared. There is no time to educate these illiterate owners; it’s now time to bring in a rule, that cattle should not be found on the highway.

There was one freaky incident when the bus in which I traveled hit 6 cows together and there was a pool of blood. I had always wanted to do something before things like this happen. But I did not know where to start. This is some strange problem difficult to be addressed. But I had to do something before more of such accidents happened.

I started with the Blue cross. They are just so kind on animals that they pointed me to another organization called an SPCA (Society for prevention of cruelty on animals). They had no idea if this problem was to be addressed by them. But they were helpful in two ways – 1. They gave me a phrase to define the problem (“Abandoned animals on road”) and 2. They pointed me to AWB (Animal welfare board).

Now at this stage if you are thinking of giving this review a ‘Very useful’ because I have given you information that there are so many animal care organizations, give it a second thought. It wasn’t of least help to me on the first hand. If they could do nothing about this problem of mine, what is the use of their existence?

AWB wasn’t of help either. They showed me to Corporation and police station. I got fed up. I went to press. There is a local free newsletter called ‘Adayar times’. Thought that would work out but wasn’t to be. They were keen enough only in publishing ‘This student got first place in the chess competition conducted at his own school … ‘ stuff.

So Corporation is the only thing that is still left. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind that they will point fingers to someone else. Nevertheless, I will give that too a try. Is there any other way I can stop this slaughter of animals? Does any one know where I could resort to for this issue? Is this a small issue that I alone consider important? Is life not a life, be it a cow or a human?

-Vinayak