Casino Theatre – Chennai Photos

Casino Theater – Chennai Photos – Chennai’s Casino theater to reopen with Ajith’s ‘Nerkonda Paarvai’ The 78-year-old theater is likely to reopen on August 8 after renovation.

Chennai’s only screen – the Casino Theater – is getting a new lease of life, with efforts underway to refurbish the interior of the theatre.

Casino Theatre – Chennai Photos

Casino Theatre - Chennai Photos

Enter the casino and you will be surprised inside, because nothing is known about the theater. The wooden seats have been replaced with comfortable cushioned seats. Right from the projector to the sound system, everything gets a nice upgrade.

Casino Theater Mount Road Chennai

“We are doing our best to give the audience a satisfactory theater experience,” the spokesman said, adding that the renovation work had begun within a month of her return.

SPI Cinemas was the previous shareholder and managed the operation of the theater until the lease expired earlier this year. The agreement is now an independent organisation. Ajith Kumar-starrer Casino Theater is likely to work completely

, which will be released on August 8. “Our initial plan was to open the theater sometime in the second week of August. Since it is an Ajith Kumar film, we skip day and night to open it

The Casino Theater opened on December 13, 1941 and the first film shown was a British drama.

Continuum At Kalakriti Art Gallery, Hyderabad: Artists Highlight Cinema, Politics, Food, Migration And The Timelessness Of Sculptures

. The theater is owned by the family of JH Irani, who visited Madras in the early 1930s to set up an ice factory on General Patters Road.

The theater showed English films in its first ten years. But he started acting in Tamil films in the mid-1950s. However, the theater returned to showing English language films in 1971.

In the early 2000s, the Casino Theater started showing popular Telugu movies and became a home for Telugu people living in the city. his engineer son, Firoz. Photo: N Sridharan

Casino Theatre - Chennai Photos

In Chennai’s congested and noisy North Royapuram area, the peaceful 104-year-old Jal Phiroj Clubwala Fire Temple Dar-e-Meher is out of the ordinary. A man in trousers, a half-sleeve shirt and a baseball cap arrives on his scooter and introduces himself as Bomi Vazifdar, the priest of a Zoroastrian temple. He says: “Not many people come to the temple. Earlier, Royapuram was the Paris base of the city.

Top 10 Theaters In Chennai

As you drive the Anna Salai artery, or Mount Road, the offerings of the Parsis – as the first Zoroastrian settlers in India are known – jump out at you: the Dhun building, the Tarapore Tower, the Casino Theatre, and Elphinstone and Wellington. theatres. Equally good are the small cafes from Iran on this trip.

A quick afternoon tea at one of these cafes is unlike their counterparts in places like Mumbai, which are prized for their spacious interiors, wooden chairs, marble tables, chandeliers, and a sharp-eyed Parsi owner behind the cash counter. In Chennai, although owned by Iranis, the cafes are like any other local tea shop, with a familiar image of Zoroaster, the founder of Zoroastrianism, to distinguish them.

Parsis and Iranians follow Zoroastrianism, but are divided based on when they migrated to India – the former fled to Iran around the 8th to 10th century, and the latter arrived in the 19th century. The congregation has dwindled to 69,000 members across India, mostly in Gujarat and Mumbai, with only about 250 remaining in Chennai.

Zarin Mistry, a Chennai-born Parsi and Secretary of the Madras Parsi Association, says, “Language is a big barrier here, but people come by migration and some have businesses here. My father, Dr. MM Cooper, moved from Lahore to Chennai in 1934. As the head of the Anatomy department in the Madras Medical College, Dr. Cooper a central figure in the city’s medical family and the Parsi community. When he died in 2002, an obituary in the Journal of Anatomical Society read: “Meherji’s remarkable achievements and principled (sic) life helped put the Parsi name firmly on the map of Madras.”

Photo Fullsize: Techno Park At Ritchie Street, Chennai

Other notable Parsi Chennaiites include social worker Mary Clubwala Jhadav (who founded the Madras School of Social Work in 1952); cinematographers Adi Irani (Alam Ara, Kamadhenu SS Vasan and Bala Nagamma) and Mehli Irani; Minoo K Belgamala, one of the founders of Madras Motor Sports Club; architect JH Tarapore; civil engineer Hormusji Nowroji (who historian Sriram V calls “the father of Chennai’s water supply”); Soli Darulwala, who opened Chennai’s first modern art gallery; and many others.

“I think we all succeeded and, as far as I’m concerned, I used everything I can. I speak a little Tamil and I love the culture and food of the South. Many people from Mumbai intend the to leave the city, but some are relieved and choose to stay,” said Mistry.

According to him, the first official account of Parsis establishing a foundation in Chennai is Heerjibhai Maneckji Kharas who came from Coorg with five other Parsis and two priests in the early 19th century. The East India Company was strong in the newly founded city of Madras. The Parsis chose to plant their roots in the Royapuram area.

Casino Theatre - Chennai Photos

It was later, in 1910, that the Cluwala family built a local Parsi fire temple – the first and only one in Tamil Nadu, Kerala and the former French colony of Puducherry.

Chennai And Its Old Parsi Flame

Today, only one member of the Cluwala family remains in Chennai. Born in Karachi, Mani Clubwala married into a family in 1947 and moved to Chennai with her husband, a director at EID Parry, in the 1960s. His sons and grandchildren are American, and the 86-year-old lives alone in a sprawling house in Santhome, south of Chennai. As Parsi families grew over the years, they gradually moved out of Royapuram to other areas, he said.

The close-knit community gathers for monthly meetings, the Parsi New Year and during Jamshedi Navroz at the Cluwala Hall near the fire temple.

Parsis in Chennai, as elsewhere in the country, are concerned about their dwindling numbers. Cluwalala, tongue firmly in cheek, acknowledges the campaign sponsored by the Jiyo Parsi Government, which clearly asks Parsis to have more children. “We’re almost done,” he says with a smile. “I think advertising is fun. All these people should wake up and do something!”

Mistry’s children also left Chennai to continue their work. He says: “We don’t have enough young people who can connect with people and, hopefully, get married in the community,” he says.

End Of An Era: Chennai’s Agastya Theater Joins List Of Single Screens That Have Shut

Chennai’s Parsis and Iranis are determined to support their aging community. “It is our duty, as a society, to see that they live with dignity. The Madras Parsi Zarthosti Anjuman has a guest house and we provide them with medical assistance, subsidized rent and so on,” said Mistry.

Pastor Vazifdar admits that the Trust and the community are always there to support him, whether it is his daughter’s school fees or his wife’s medical expenses.

After more than 200 years in the city, time may be winding down for Chennai’s Parsi community, but their greatest legacy lives on in the many excellent institutions they left behind at home. Updated on November 17, 2021 04:09 am IST – art deco architecture, CIFF, Casino theater

Casino Theatre - Chennai Photos

The Casino Theatre, an example of art deco architecture in the city, is being renovated ahead of the festival – Photo: Special arrangement

Avm Saravanan & Sp Muthuraman Inaugurates Casino Theater Stills

One of the best examples of art deco architecture in Chennai, the Casino theater is undergoing renovation, and will be renovated and refurbished to host the Chennai International Film Festival, which starts later this month.

The Casino’s beautiful staircase wall is painted in art deco dark blue, its seats are cleaned and the old 35 mm film projector is replaced by a state-of-the-art 2K projector. The sound system has also been updated and a new air conditioning system has been installed to replace the old system. All this will not provide a comfortable viewing experience for the film public, it will bring life to the past.

Many of my generation and those before it will be pleased to know that the weighing scale in the entrance hall, whose fortune-telling ability was more reliable than its weight, with its flashing lights and spinning wheel, has also been repaired.

I remember in the early 70’s, trying to sneak out to watch a James Bond movie for adults only, only to be caught by an usher and sent away. This, without liberal use of eyebrow pencil to darken my rare mustache.

Film Festival Loses Its Woodlands Home

To fully understand the Casino, we need to go back some 70 years and picture Mount Road as it was known at the time. Wagon road from Fort St. George to St. Tomás Sliabh. Thomas de Havilland gave it current contours in the early 1800s. In the 1940s, Hill Road had two separate locations. Until now Vivanta is the Taj Connemara Hotel, housing businesses, shops, hotels, restaurants and cinemas. After that, there were large bungalows. This was the original Madras.

The Gaiety on Blackers Road was the first theater for Indians,