Sometime ago, there was a poster that went viral on several social networking sites. The green and orange poster, complete with a davara-tumbler icon, said, ‘Chennai is a city, but Madras is an emotion’. That spirit of ‘Madras’ seems to be perfectly encapsulated in 23-year-old Raunaq Mangottil’s new Facebook page, I Am Madras.
Inspired by pages like Humans of New York and photographer Danny Santos’ Portraits of Strangers, I Am Madras is an amalgamation of all the people that make the city what it is. The one-month-old page already has more than a 1,000 ‘likes’ and counting.
I Am Madras initially started out as a means for Raunaq to get out of his comfort zone and meet new people, but it turned into a storytelling exercise when he began to listen to the tales that Chennaiites had to tell. “I’d had an idea about doing something like this since my school days,” says Raunaq, who picked up a passion for photography even though he went on to study engineering.
The page not only has close-up portraits of interesting people, but also stories to go along with them – like the tea stall boy who just wanted his picture taken but wasn’t interested in seeing how it turned out... or the Bihari who came to Chennai for work and found out that he had had a completely different picture of the city in his mind.
“The people I meet are always so happy to get their picture taken,” says the hobby photographer. “There was one auto-driver who was so happy that he made me click photos of all his friends and finally brought me tea for giving him that opportunity. I think that has been my best experience so far,” says Raunaq, who’s a Malayalee by birth, but says he speaks Tamil better than Malayalam.
People now call me and ask for their friends to be featured on the page, he adds. But Raunaq has other plans. “A friend put me in touch with a member of the homosexual community in the city and some of them are quite interested to come out of the closet on this forum,” he says and adds, “This is something that I’d have never done two years ago. It goes to show how much meeting new people changes you. That’s how much Chennai changes you.”