Chennai
the detroit of india By Ben Austin
In July of this year, I headed out to India. Chennai in Tamil Nadu to be exact, in the deep, cultured and monsoon- lashed South. I was heading over to India for reasons not too dissimilar to Christopher Columbus, actually. Okay, admittedly, I wasn’t looking to find a quicker trade route from the Mediterranean and I certainly didn’t bring with me an army of men and a whole amount of scurvy. But I was exploring. I was exploring new lands, new people and new opportunities. Entrepreneurs, life inquisitors and culture vultures do that, for no other reason than to see what’s under each stone. And little did I know what splendour and amazement I would find.
48 hours after my arrival in Chennai, I was sat in a coffee shop looking at my forthcoming agenda for the weeks ahead and watching the enchanting and organised chaos on the roads outside. Millions of people wanting to get to a million places. The sounds and the colours were hypnotic and entrancing. Commuting in Chennai was not for the faint hearted, and not dissimilar to Mexico City for its vigour and frenzy.Here however the people behind each automobile were a lot more passive. Zero aggression in sight. Instead, just a whole lot of charming bustle.
From automobiles to automobile plants. I learned that it’s for this very reason that Chennai has been gifted the name: “The Detroit of India”. Hoards of car manufacturers either chose Chennai as their first India base to tap into the ever-increasing boom in the country or they relocated their existing plant from the North. Whichever, it’s this that allegedly started the term and it’s this that I learned passed from entrepreneur to entrepreneur, yet often changing its meaning, but always used as a beacon of light to shine on this great city. Chennai: The Detroit of India. Yes, alright – I reckon it sounds pretty neat too.
I met with a number of incredibly interesting and engaging entrepreneurs during my stay here. Those that defied the ordinary, convention and those that were doing things differently, each of them I had great pleasure in getting to know.
My first meeting took me to Christie Fernandez’s creative agency – Pixelkraft (
www.pixelkraft.in). Christie – who proudly boasts a heritage line of Portuguese descent – runs an incredibly capable design and marketing agency in the heart of Chennai with his co-founder, Siddharth, which in all my years of outsourcing to India, never have I found an agency quite on the same level as this. On a par to many of London and New York’s design agencies, Christie shared with me his secret. “First and foremost, you’ve got to have patience and investment into your team. Without this, you have no supply to offer. Furthermore, we use the West as our benchmark. If we were to use the majority of other Indian competitors as our level of attainment, then we’d unfortunately sink into the abyss. By reinventing the world’s ideas with our own stamp – fuelled from those doing it well – means we can always offer a unique edge to our clients here.”
For the first time in my own personal experience, I’d found a creative agency in India that didn’t want to just be a nuts and bolts back-end technical development centre, they were executing for high standard clients throughout the world and creating their own IP too – a number of social networks to boot. Here lied a company that was as equally talented with its ideas as it was with its front end execution. A harmony, that years before would seldom be seen outside of the West.
48 entrepreneurcountry
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