Minimum city

I&rsquom never quite sure what it is about cities that drive usto such passionately engaged views of them. Perhaps because they are the most congested agglomerations of humankind, often with colourful and significant histories, they offer sharp, microcosmic and variegated perspectives on contemporary soci&shyeties, thus making them an endlessly interesting theme to read (and write about). Or perhaps where we grow up, live and work (they could be different places, of course) has a transformative effect on what we become and still want to be, as Tulsi Badrinath suggests in the title of her fourth book on Chennai.

The author employs the unusual (for a book) journalistic device of talking to noteworthy lo&shycals with an intimate understanding of the city, and her own affection for it is not inconsider&shyable. Each of the dozen chapters begin with her autobiographical vignettes, which flow into an abbreviated telling of the life and outlook of one personality, thoughtfully selected for the diver&shysity in their backgrounds, such as &lsquokarate expert&rsquo K.Seshadri, Dalit writer and activist P.Sivakami, the Nawab Mohammed Abdul Ali (the current and eighth Prince of Arcot), film star Vikram and gynaecologist Dr Uma Ram.

The introduction to Badrinath says Chennai, her birthplace and also her chosen home, has always been central to her work, and the book tends towards the encomiastic, as much of the land as of the people who speak in it (this is most glaringly apparent in her profile of tech-whiz Kiruba Shankar &mdash &lsquoWhat was the Kiruba magic, I asked him&rsquo &mdash in which no mention is made of the cancellation of his TEDx Chennai licence after repeated violations). Badrinath switches between first person, raconteuring and quotes to deliver her interview-stories, so there is a sense of sifting through chatty conversations to arrive at the stated purpose of the book. It&rsquos not the most penetrating or interpretative of formats, but it does convey the famously earnest industriousness of Madras-Chennai remarkably well by resolutely sticking to that very virtue.