Consulates in Chennai


Austrian Consulate in Chennai
114-117, Kothari Building,Mahatma Gandhi Road, Chennai - 600 034.
Contact Info: 91-44-2827 6036, 91-44-2827 8739


Embassy of Belgium in Chennai
SPIC House, 88, Anna Salai, Chennai - 600 032.
Contact Info: 91-44-2235 2336, 91-44-2235 0877.


British High Commisision in Chennai
20 Anderson Road, Chennai - 600 006.
Contact Info: 91-44-52192308, 91-44-5219 2310.


Consulate of Chile in Chennai
Oakland House, 7, Adayar Club Gate Road, Chennai - 600 028.
Contact Info: 91-044-2434 0610.


Canadian Consulate in Chennai
18 (Old 24), 3rd floor, YAFA Tower, Khader Nawaz Khan Road, Nungambakkam, Chennai - 600 034
Contact Info: 91-44-2833 0888.


Embassy of Czech Republic in Chennai
4, Thirumalai Pillai Road, T. Nagar, Chennai - 600 017.
Contact Info: 91-044-2815 8886.


Danish Consulate in Chennai
8, Cathedral Road,Chennai-600 086
Contact Info: 91-44-2811 8140, 91-44-2811 8141.


Finland Consulate in Chennai
New 202, Old 742, Anna Salai Chennai-600 002
Contact Info: 91-44-2852 4141, 91-44-2852 3622.


French Consulate in Chennai
40, College Road, Chennai - 600 006.
Contact Info: 91-44-2826 6561, 91-44-2827 0469.


German Consulate in Chennai
No. 9 Boat Club Road, RA Puram - Chennai 600 028.
Contact Info: 91-44-2430 1600.


Greece Consulate in Chennai
9, Cathedral Road, Chennai- 600 086.
Contact Info: 91-044-2811 8000.


Hungary Consulate in Chennai
Time House, 28, New 72, Rajaji Salai, Chennai-600 001.
Contact Info: 91-044-2523 1267.


Iceland Consulate in Chennai
2nd Floor, 3, 4th Lane, Bhavani Mansion, Nungambakkam Hign Road, Chennai-600 034.
Contact Info: 91-044-2821 3631.


Indonesian Consulate in Chennai
2D, 'Eldorado', 112, Nungambakkam High Road, Chennai 600034.
Contact Info: 91-044-2820 6845, 91-044-2820 6085, 91-044-2825 3337, 91-044-5566 8301.


Consulate of Italy in Chennai
19, Rajaji Salai, Chennai-600 001
Contact Info: 91-044-2534 1110.


Japanese Consulate in Chennai
60, Spur Tank Road,Chetput, Chennai-600 031.
Contact Info: 91-044-2826 5594.


Consulate of South Korea in Chennai
29,Kothari Road, Nungambakkam, Chennai - 600 034.
Contact Info: 91-044-2823 7307.


Malaysian Embassy in Chennai
6, Sriram Nagar, North St, Alwarpet, Chennai - 600 018.
Contact Info: 91-044-2434 3048.


Consulate of New Zealand in Chennai
132, Cathedral Road, Chennai - 600 086.
Contact Info: 91-044-2811 2473.


Consulate of Netherlands in Chennai
#203, 2nd floor, Sigma Wing,'A' Block, Raheja Towers, 177,Anna Salai, Chennai-600 002.
Contact Info: 91-044-5215 8388, 91-44-2286 0164.


Norwegian Consulate in Chennai
Harbour Gate House, 44/45 Rajaji Road, Chennai - 600 001.
Contact Info: 91-044-2524 5314, 91-044-2523 2981 - 83.


Philippines Consulate in Chennai
Spic House Annex, 8th Floor, 88, Anna Salai, Guindy, Chennai-600 032.
Contact Info: 91-044-2235 4063.


The Embassy of Russian Federation in Chennai
14, Santhome High Road, Chennai-600 004.
Contact Info: 91-044-2498 2320.


Singapore Consulate in Chennai
17-A North Boag Road, T.Nagar, Chennai- 600 017.
Contact Info: 91-044-2827 3795.


Consulate of Spain in Chennai
8/2, Nimmo Road, Santhome, Chennai - 600 004.
Contact Info: 91-044-2827 6036.


Sri Lankan High Commission in Chennai
196, T.T.K Road, Alwarpet, Chennai - 600 018.
Contact Info: 91-044-2498 7896, 91-44-2498 7612.


Embassy of Sweden in Chennai
6, Cathedral Road, Chennai - 600 086.
Contact Info: 91-044-2811 2232.


Consulate of Switzerland in Chennai
224, T.T.K Road, Alwarpet, Chennai - 600 018.
Contact Info: 91-044-2433 2701.


US Consulate in Chennai
Gemini Circle, 220, Anna Salai, Chennai-600 006.
Contact Info: 91-44-2857 4242, 91-44-2857 4000.


Bhopal: A Prayer for Rain

A film starring top Hollywood actors that dramatises the Bhopal gas disaster has been criticised by campaigners and participants in the tragedy for misrepresenting individuals and the facts.Bhopal: A Prayer for Rain is due for release this autumn with Mischa Barton and Martin Sheen in leading roles.Shot largely in India, it portrays the events around the world's worst industrial accident, in which clouds of toxic gas escaped from a chemical plant run by a part-owned subsidiary of American company Union Carbide.

More than 8,000 people, mainly living in slums around the plant, died immediately when the gas leaked shortly after midnight on 3 December 1984. At least 25,000 others are estimated to have died over subsequent years and many more continue to suffer today.Ravi Kumar, the writer and director, said the film was "a dramatisation, inspired by real events."There are 18- and 19-year-olds across India and across the world who have never heard of Bhopal. I could have made a four-hour documentary that no one would have seen.
"This way a whole new generation will learn about what happened and a whole series of very important and relevant questions can be discussed," said Kumar, a London-based paediatrician who has raised more than $5m from Indian private backers for the project.

Sheen plays Warren Anderson, the chief executive of Union Carbide, headquartered in Danbury, Connecticut. Barton plays Eva Gascon, a fictitious reporter from Paris-Match who learns of the problems at the plant from a local journalist but decides not to publish a story.The film ends with an imagined present-day meeting between Anderson and Gascon in the former's country club in America. The journalist is racked with remorse. Anderson is unrepentant.Earlier versions of the script, obtained by the Guardian and Bhopal campaigners, have angered many.

"There is not a single Bhopali with upright moral standards in the script. Of course the people of the city are going to be angry. They are made to look comic, corrupt or passive victims," said Satinath Sarangi, managing trustee of the Sambhavna Clinic which helps the estimated 150,000 suffering health problems due to the disaster.Raj Kumar Keswani, editor of a local newspaper in Bophal, who wrote a series of articles before the disaster outlining the danger posed by the plant, said reading the script had been "very painful".Keswani, portrayed in the film as a foul-mouthed buffoon, said: "My sincerity, integrity and commitment has been distorted and trivialised [and] other characters of Bhopal have not been treated fairly." Kumar said he tried to contact Keswani before filming but had been rebuffed. The journalist said no such attempts had been made and that he was "always accessible".

The film is also likely to reopen debate over who was responsible for the disaster. Union Carbide Corporation (UCC), now owned by Dow Chemical Company, has always claimed that its Indian subsidiary Union Carbide India Limited (UCIL), 49% of which was owned by local Indian investors, was solely responsible for the operation of the plant and that the accident was the result of sabotage by an employee who has subsequently been identified.Union Carbide denies any safety issues at the plant before the leak.

Kumar, who was born in Bhopal, said that the sabotage theory had been "totally discounted". His film instead shows an ill-equipped and poorly-trained Indian workforce struggling to work with badly maintained equipment.Tim Edwards, of the International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal, said that despite serious flaws the film's script was "not all bad."It depicts the cost-cutting regime imposed by the parent UCC on subsidiary UCIL pretty well. There is also substance to the depiction of local management culpability. Overall, [the film] does make [Union] Carbide look like white-man's-burden colonialists who put big dreams and profits before practical worker health and community safety," he said.

However, Edwards said that the film "glossed over the degree of control and responsibility of US officials" and failed to portray strenuous efforts made by representatives of the workforce to get improvements on safety, particularly after a series of accidents and the death of at least one worker at the plant in the years before the accident.Kumar said that Sheen had "sharpened" the character of Anderson, who is still alive, to make the message of the film "more black and white.

"Marty wanted him to be less ambivalent than in the original script."Now [Anderson] basically blames everything on the Indians and walks away," Kumar said.The Union Carbide plant in Bhopal was set up on an unpopulated site on the outskirts of the city in 1969 to manufacture pesticides for use in India's push to improve agricultural productivity. The city grew to envelop the plant, which started manufacturing the volatile chemical Methyl isocyanate, which forms toxic gas on contact with water, in 1979. Much of the action of the film takes place in the shantytowns which had grown up around the plant where most of the victims lived.

Hazra Bee, a resident of Bhopal whose grandchildren suffer serious birth-defects said that enough films had been made on the events leading up to the tragedy. The most important thing now was to highlight the ongoing consequences of the disaster, she said.

Alexey Balabanov-Auteur Director of Soviet Russia

Born:   25 February 1959
Film Director
     
Alekxey Balabanov has gained wide acclaim of mass public thanks to his tough action movies about Russian mafia. Why bandits? “People have always watched and will watch films about bandits” – says the film director in his interviews. “I create films in turn: popular – unpopular… and it is not deliberately, it just happens this way.” Soon Balabanov is going to release a new (non-bandit) film, and time will show, if it is popular or not. Anyway, all of his films, whether obviously aimed at love of masses or not, are not devoid of significant ideas and powerful impact on the viewer – that is what makes Aleksei Balabanov interesting.
Alexey Balabanov was born on February 25, 1959 in Sverdlovsk (now Yekaterinburg). In 1981 he graduated from Translation Faculty of Gorky Teachers’ Training University. From 1983 to 1987 Alexei worked as an assistant of a film director at Sverdlovsk film studio. Later Balabanov studied at the experimental course “Authors’ Cinema” of the High Courses for Scriptwriters and Film Directors, graduating in 1990.
Balabanov directing 'Voyna' Balabanov started his creative career in “big cinema” in 1991 with directing his first full-length feature Shchastlivyye dni (Happy Days) after his own script. In the same year he became the co-author of the script Pogranichniy Conflict (Frontier Conflict) by the young film director Nadezhda Khvorova. In 1992 Aleksei Balabanov together with producers Sergei Selyanov and Vasily Grigor'ev established the STV Film Company, which later participated in creation of almost all of his films.
In 1994 the film director released Zamok (The Castle) after the famous novel by Frantz Kafka. In the same year Balabanov debuted as a producer, with the film Ispoved neznakomtsu (Secrets Shared with a Stranger). Next year he took part in creation of the film almanac Pribytiye poyezda (The Arrival of a Train) (1995) dedicated to the 100th anniversary of cinematography; Balabanov’s segment Trofim won a number of cinema awards.
'Brat' However, it was the criminal action Brat (The Brother) (1997) that became Aleksei Balabanov’s real breakthrough into the “high cinema league”. The feature starring Sergei Bodrov Jr. (1971-2002) and with the soundtrack containing songs by Vyacheslav Butusov, the frontman of rock band Nautilus Pompilius at once made a cult movie and the most smashing box office hit of the year.
After such an overwhelming success with mass audience Aleksei Balabanov made quite a sudden turn by creating the art-house film Pro urodov i lyudey (Of Freaks and Men) (1998) starring Sergei Makovetsky. The original and provocative film tells about the first pornographers in pre-revolutionary Russia.
Balabanov’s next work was Brat 2 (The Brother II) (2000). Unlike the first Brother, which can be considered a tough social drama, its sequel is rather a black comedy with an almost unfeasible plot. Soundtrack to this bright and impressive movie included music by then little known rock bands, which became famous along with the film right after its premiere. So, the second Brother also won love of the Russians: it became another Balabanov’s blockbuster, an absolute champion of the year on the film market.
'Zhmurki' Soon Alexey Balabanov again surprised everyone by starting work on the film Reka (River, or At the End of the Earth) featuring life in a Yakut village for the leprous in the early 20th century. Unfortunately, a tragedy befell the film crew – the actress of the Yakut Nastional Theatre Tuinara Svinoboeva, who played the main role, died after a car accident. The project was stopped. Yet, a year later the film director arranged the footage with the off-screen comments of the missing scenes.
In 2002 Alexey Balabanov released the feature Voyna (War) (2002) starring Sergei Bodrov Jr again. The film telling the story of people taken hostage by Chechen terrorists was shot in the mountains of North Caucasus, and in particular in Chechnya.
Balabanov directing 'Mne ne bolno' Balabanov’s black comedy Zhmurki (Blind Man's Bluff) (2005) brings us back to the mid 1990s: noisy and bloody bustle with shooting, biting dialogues and fights in a provincial town, and all that around a case with heroine.
The touching melodrama Mne ne bolno (It Doesn't Hurt) (2006) about three young designers and a way-out woman excels in literate composition, gradually and unhurriedly immersing the characters and viewers into a painful mystery.
In 2007 Alexey Balabanov plans to release his new film Gruz 200 (Freight 200) based on his own scenario.


Resources:
    peoples.ru
    ctb.ru
    rg.ru
Photos
    newizv.ru
    ctb.ru
    mne-ne-bolno.ru