A raised pathway along the eastern side of Buckingham canal in Sholinganallur is undisturbed through the week. Except for intermittent bird calls, there is only the sound of silence. During the weekend, the calm is broken by the occasional rumble of motorcycles. More often than not, these are young software professionals heading towards a sequestered space, off this pathway, for a game of cricket.
Nobody knows who owns this space; but these youngsters have ‘borrowed’ it to spice up their weekend. Low-level stone posts have been pegged into the earth in a circular formation to give the space the look and character of a cricket ground. For the most part, the surface is uneven. But these youngsters have taken tripping and falling in their stride, seeing it as a defining feature of their weekend cricket. Not too far away, on the Sholinganallur-Medavakkam Link Road, another makeshift playground beckons techies. The land, proximate to the Sholinganallur IT/ITES Special Economic Zone, belongs to the Central Institute of Classical Tamil. As this space is on a prominent road, it draws more teams during the weekend. On Saturday and Sunday mornings, the section of the road outside the property is lined with motorcycles.
Football Is In Our Blood (FIIOB), an initiative born in Kolkata (where else could it be?) has a presence on OMR — a few software engineers have formed a Chennai chapter. Though membership is not restricted to them, software professionals working on OMR make up the majority in FIIOB Chennai. In the initial days, the young techies played football in an open space behind the Infosys office in Sholinganallur, and later began to look for better playing fields, which took them to synthetic indoor football grounds. But their desire is to play outdoors, on large grounds. With OMR unable to offer a public playground, they have played at such facilities found in the older parts of Chennai, including a Corporation playground in Mandaveli.
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It’s surprising that OMR lacks a public playground, despite a large part of it coming under Greater Chennai Corporation limits. Perungudi and Sholinganallur are among the eight new zones that were added to the Corporation in 2011, but the IT Corridor is yet to get off the mark, when it comes to public playgrounds.
To redeem the situation, Greater Chennai Corporation could identify open spaces belonging to other State agencies and seek the Government’s sanction to turn them into playgrounds for the residents of OMR. It could also look at the possibility of creating playgrounds out of Open Space Reservation (OSR) lands from huge projects on OMR. Though project managers may prefer creating parks to playgrounds, the civic body should persuade them to build playgrounds. That would be in the interests of OMR residents, especially its young techies.