The daily commute to Madras

A travel ticket can take its keeper places even decades after it had lost its validity — that is, if you happen to be one Thirupurasundari Sevvel, who is constantly on the lookout for “tickets” that enable a time travel to the past.  Her name rings a bell in many history circles, and a resounding bell in groups that relish the pursuit of decoding Madras. Multidimensional, Thirupurasundari is an architect and urban planner and a relentless tracker of history. And Madras is her passion project, one without a deadline, meant to last a lifetime. She has taken multiple “routes” to Madras through documentation of historical records and engaging storytelling filtered out of oral histories. Her efforts to map out the historical and cultural landscape of Anna Nagar (where she stays) through a collection of stories have been inspirational for heritage and history enthusiasts.  One particular route she has been travelling on since 2010–11, with a fascicle of tickets, has been hugely gratifying. When she was working on her master’s thesis – “Revival and Revitalisation of a Historic Urban Precinct: Case of Triplicane”, her father handed her a newspaper clipping about S.A. Govindaraju, a heritage enthusiast, who was largely known for accumulating rare books. Meeting him, “I began to see the value of everyday objects in telling the story of a city,” observes Thirupurasundari. By March 2011, she had become richer by a trickle of tram tickets.