Thanks for the view & the greenery. Now, how about a fresh coat of paint ?

If you have been away from Chennai for some months and were to return now, as you drive around in the city, you would sense that something is really different about the city, though
you can be forgiven for not being able to catch what actually changed.

Well, thanks to the government's decision to ban hoardings/billboards in the city, all the billboards advertising anything & everything under the sky, have been removed from the
city scape. The reasoning being that motorists get distracted ogling these advertisements, leading to accidents on the road.

While I have not had any accidents yet, I used to do my fair share of ogling the billboards.
My criteria for a billboard being ogle-worthy is simple - it should feature a pretty specimen
of the fairer sex. The billboards of Apollo Hospitals, Deccan Chronicle, etc were some of the
billboards that I regularly gazed at during my drive to work and back.

Anyway, coming back to the topic, Chennai with all the billboards gone, looks kind of nude.
Sort of like a freshly tonsured head. A part of the city's charm went missing along with the billboards that were removed.

The good thing is that you get to see the city in an entirely different light. Not only is the
view better, but you discover that Chennai is indeed quite a green city. You never knew
that the billboards were hiding behind them such a large amount of greenery.

Ofcourse there has to be a catch somewhere, right ? And that is having to bear the gory
sight of the buildings exposed due to the billboards being removed. All these years, they
stood there away from public gaze, which seems to have led the owners to think of saving
some money by not painting them for decades. And now they stick out in all their ugliness,
spoiling the cityscape.

Hope the owners spend some money in giving them a long-deserved & decent coat of paint
so that they do not spoil the cityscape. If not, maybe the government should draw up a law requiring people to keep the exteriors of their residential/office buildings in decent condition.

And poor me, I am still recovering from the withdrawal symptoms of not getting my daily
visual dose of the pretty billboard ladies.