LIC of lore, now fifty, loses lustre

Lakshmy Ramanathan / TNN / Aug 24, 2008, 07:31 IST

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In the year 1959, when Madras was still on the heels of turning into Chennai, two men from London- H J Brown and L C Moulin - drew up an ...

CHENNAI: In the year 1959, when Madras was still on the heels of turning into Chennai, two men from London- H J Brown and L C Moulin - drew up an audacious plan; a plan that was to give Madras its tallest building back then, and to its people, a talking point that effortlessly worked its way into popular culture. It was a plan that contained the blueprint of the landmark LIC building.
"I remember my father recounting tales of awestruck villagers repeatedly taking the lift to the 14th floor just to get a view of Mt Road from that height," says M Radhakrishnan, a development officer who works with LIC.
Initially conceived to be the head office of United India Life Assurance and New Guardian Life Insurance by Chidambaram Chettiar in 1952, the 177-foot tall structure, inaugurated by Morarji Desai on August 23, 1959, assumed the title of LIC with the nationalization of insurance.
Soon, the creamy mintcoloured building that had 1,26,00 sq foot floor area to its credit, came to be included in the opening shots of numerous films that catalogued the journey of the protagonist from the village to the city.

But before its construction, other establishments such as Murray & Co auctioneers and Pioneer Laundry service stood on the same plot.
"There wasn't any compound wall back then," says Santosh Kumar, whose grandfather started the laundry service back in 1918.
"A huge crowd used to gather on Sundays for the auctioneering that would take place outside Murray's," he adds.
Though the LIC building caught the fascination of the common man for years, today, the massive structure has been reduced to a bus stop on Anna Salai.

Its stolidity has been dislodged by the air of irreverence in new-age design buildings such as the DBS office that stands right opposite it.
Some of the shops on the ground floor of the LIC building are today inheritors of a rental space that has long lost its glory.
"Between the building and the bus stop, there is just a narrow service lane. The lack of parking space dissuades customers from coming to our shop," says Mohd Ashraf Shah, manager, Kashmiri Government Arts Emporium. Shah says a Kerala state emporium moved out of the building very recently for the same reason.
But to children of the late 50s and 60s, the LIC building was a structure that produced awe, filled reel time of opening film scenes and even triggered suicide attempts.
A structure that truly emerged as Chennai's first landmark.

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