I still remember my first week at college, fresh out of Madurai and stepping into a prestigious campus in Coimbatore. I arrived feeling confident in what I considered my smartest attire which defined high-fashion in Madurai. My signature look: a t-shirt layered beneath an open shirt, first two buttons deliberately left undone, a style that commanded respect back home – the classic "gethu style". For several days, I proudly wore this uniform of southern Tamil Nadu identity until a classmate's casual remark shattered my confidence. "Enna madurai ah?" they asked with a subtle, dismissive smile. In that moment, I realized my hometown fashion statement read very differently here. "Madurai"was shorthand for unpolished, rustic, somewhat outdated. In the years that followed, I tried earnestly to shed my Madurai skin, adapting to become a proper Coimbatorean, then tried many other identities a Chennaite, a part-Bangalorean, and even a wannabe New Yorker for a few years. Yet despite all my efforts at transformation, I've never fully erased the madurai-kaaran within me. The essence of Madurai follows me like an invisible thread, connecting who I was to who I've become, no matter how far I travel from those once familiar streets.
Just as my 'gethu style' marked me as an outsider in Coimbatore, my Madurai Tamil had a way of emerging in everyday conversations. Even my maternal family, settled in the more refined Coimbatore, would burst into laughter at my distinctive "Anneee" or the way I'd say "Ankittu/Inkittu/varaainga." "Say those Madurai words again," they'd urge and howl with laughter, finding entertainment in expressions that were simply everyday language back home. The years spent moving between cities gradually neutralized my accent, yet it never fully disappeared. When meeting friends or talking to fellow citizens of the old city and in moments of road rage or sudden anger, my neutrality shatters, and pure, unfiltered Madurai Tamil erupts including the colorful profanities unique to our city's streets, surprising even me.
But somehow I’ve realized the food never changed. Going with Appa on his old Kinetic Honda to different food joints introduced me to what I consider the national dish of Madurai - the Parotta (spelt Brotta). Not the dignified, whole wheat paratha of the north with its simple folds, but the extravagantly layered and flamboyant Madurai parotta. Where the paratha whispers, our parotta roars. Even now, my go-to order remains parotta, and my ritual never varies: tapping gently until the layers loosen, then tearing it apart to dip into that rich, aromatic salna, adding chicken in the middle and gently gliding it into the mouth - absolute heaven. You can't take the parotta out of someone from Madurai. Parotta wasn't mainstreamed until the late 2000s, and I've noticed the deep love for it remains primarily a South Tamil Nadu phenomenon. For folks raised in Chennai, Coimbatore, and other parts of the Tamil diaspora, it's just a dish. But for those of us from Madurai, it's nothing less than an emotion - each bite a direct connection to those midnight shops across the sleepless city of Madurai.
They say people in Madurai will sacrifice anything for someone they've recently met, a generosity of spirit that outsiders often mistake for naivety. Madurai was a high trust society and I grew up without realizing it was distinctive. In Madurai, you were ready to go the extra mile for someone because you believed they would do the same for you. Trust wasn't earned incrementally; it was the default starting position. I didn't recognize this trait until I discovered the world often operates on different principles. Many of my missteps esp. in business stemmed from this ingrained habit of leading with trust. The Madurai way of forming bonds becomes your greatest strength and vulnerability. When we built our company years later, we instinctively established trust and transparency as foundational tenets. It felt natural that my co-founders came from the same south TN mileu and they understood this unspoken approach to human connection. What surprised me was how this Madurai-born philosophy of default trust created a rare culture of belonging. Years later, former employees still tell me their best professional days were working with us. Perhaps that's the ultimate vindication of the Madurai approach to relationships
Also, the essence of Madurai I carry isn't what the world usually celebrates as cosmopolitan. It embodied something more organic, not the activist, modernist vision of diversity, but a natural coexistence where differences blend into the everyday fabric of life. I remember my childhood colony being home to people of various religions, castes, classes and language backgrounds where we as kids and our parents naturally formed friendships across different streets and homes. The street opposite our house had an orthodox Hindu home flanked on each side by Muslim and Christian families, though it had other names we used to call it the India Street. Our Muslim friends were all “mapillais”, and the neighborhood mosque served as our reliable alarm clock. We weren't taught constitutional lessons on secularism, we were just living it daily. When I notice in many other cities the ghettoization of communities based on religion, I'm struck by how different Madurai was, people simply building their homes next to strangers who eventually became friends for a lifetime. The situation outside the city might have been different, but growing up within Madurai itself gave you a larger, more accepting heart. This is perhaps why divisive political forces that succeed elsewhere never gain much traction in Madurai, you simply can't make the average person from Madurai hate his neighbor that easily. Those human bonds and lessons forged through shared daily life prove remarkably resilient.
Now, it's been more than two decades since I left my childhood home and more than a decade since we had to sell our house and kind of parted ways with what anchored us to the city. Madurai wasn't even a city that my mom or dad grew up in, it was just a place where they found jobs in their 30s and raised the two of us. I don't see myself going back or another generation of mine calling Madurai their home. When I asked my wife recently if she sees any Madurai traits in me, she simply said, "That's the only thing I see in you." Perhaps that's the truest reflection of who I am. In the food I eat, the language I speak, in the things I value in people, and in celebrating the shared humanity around me - I will probably be forever shaped by my memories of Madurai.
