“Eating a MEAL with your hands in banana leaf is always special, isn’t it?” — reads the first line of the description of a video uploaded on the YouTube page of the U.S. Consulate General, Chennai. The video, which was the first of a series initiated by the U.S. Consulate here to celebrate Madras Week, chronicles an expatriate family having a meal at the Kasivinayaga Mess in Triplicane.
Titled ‘Happy Madras Week: At Kasivinayaga Mess,’ the video, which was also uploaded on the Consulate General’s Facebook page, has gone viral with over a lakh shares and more than 3.7 million views.
“As part of an eight-part video series for Madras Week, we want to focus on how Americans are connecting with the culture here and depict the things that we enjoy doing here — right from indulging in the local cuisine to experiences unique to the city,” said Eric T. Lund, acting public affairs officer.
While the second video showed the experience of an expat who learnt how to braid flowers from a flower seller near the Kapaleeswarar Temple, the third video has an American couple shopping for traditional clothes.
“I was taught how to drape a sari as well,” said Ksenia Roesing, who works in the Consular section of the consulate. Featuring along with her in the video, her husband Richard Roesing, a management officer at the consulate, said that the most appealing aspects of the city were the cuisine and sporting events such as the Chennai Open Tennis tournament and the Futsal League, which they had got a chance to watch.
On Wednesday evening, the fourth video showed expats drinking tender coconut water from a roadside stall, besides learning to cut them open.
The videos that feature Americans working at the consulate here and their families will seek to document more such experiences this week, with a video being released on the official Facebook page of the U.S. Consulate General every evening.
