Virtual tour explores Chennai’s links with the U.S.

U.S. Consul General Judith Ravin joins Madra Week celebrations

A virtual tour titled “America in Chennai - Sites, Streets, Structures” was organised by the United States-India Educational Foundation (USIEF) in collaboration with the University of Madras. It kickstarted the U.S. Consulate General Chennai’s Madras Week celebrations. U.S. Consul General in Chennai Judith Ravin joined Indian Fulbright-Nehru alumnus Professor Suresh Sethuraman on the virtual tour. “Today, we not only celebrate the Fulbright Program’s 75th anniversary but also the founding day of the city called Madras, which is now Chennai. I would like to remind everyone that American Center Chennai, housed inside the U.S. Consulate building in Chennai, has a special corner dedicated to the city’s famed historian, S. Muthiah, one of the founders of Madras Day,” she said. In his lecture, which was filled with anecdotes,Prof. Sethuraman, archaeologist and architectural historian, shared fascinating facts about the city’s historic links with America. “Chennai boasts several sites, streets, and structures that have strong ‘America’ connections — the St. Mary’s church within Fort St. George where Elihu Yale of Yale University fame got married in 1680, the Ice House on Kamarajar Salai where ice from Massachusetts was stored in the nineteenth century, the YMCA building in front of the Madras High Court built with financial aid from the U.S. in 1900, to name only a few,” he said.