Is Anna Street in Thiruvanmiyur having an ‘extended monsoon’?

As with wisdom stories emerging from antiquity, the Aesop’s fable The Two Bags is paraded in various forms, the rechiselling happening every time a new allegorist picks it up. As with wisdom stories, the chiselling is usually intricate never reaching the kernel of the story and altering its message. Here it is: humans have two bags around their neck, the one bearing other’s people’s faults dangling in front of their eyes and the one bearing their own, hanging behind them and staying unseen. In a hyperlocal version (with the dateline “Anna Street, Thiruvanmiyur) that presses the chisel deeper and alters the message, Greater Chennai Corporation is wearing both bags in front of its eyes, and is at peace with what it discovers inside both. 

The monsoon has long retreated, but the tractor rolled into Anna Street in Thiruvanmiyur to check waterlogging stays put. It stands within a hair’s breadth of the compound wall of Kalakshetra Foundation’s craft centre, just across its main campus. Oddly, the tractor still wears the banner proclaiming its service to Greater Chennai Corporation’s flood mitigation work in 2025. The machine has obviously tarried longer than it should on a narrow but significant link road where motorists are often cramped for space. For all practical purposes, the tractor is an “abandoned vehicle”. GCC is comfortable with the tractor’s presence, as also with a white cab with flat tyres standing abandoned on the other side of the road, the side where parking is allowed.

The tractor; and on the other side of the road, the one meant for parking, a car with flat tyres stays put too. The image was taken on January 22, 2026.
| Photo Credit:
PRINCE FREDERICK

On any other road, vehicles cooling their tyres indefinitely might be viewed without a pained look, but not on Anna Street its girth disproportionately narrow to the volume of traffic it entertains.