Chennai City

Introduction
Chennai has neither the cosmopolitan, prosperous air of Mumbai (Bombay), the optimistic buzz of Bengaluru (Bangalore) or the historical drama of Delhi. It's muggy, terribly polluted, hot as hell and difficult to get around. Traditional tourist attractions are few.

Even the movie stars are, as one Chennaiker put it, 'not that hot'.But then, the residents are a little friendlier than average here, the streets a little wider, and, in spite of its booming IT, business-outsourcing and auto industries, the pace much slower than that of most Indian cities half its size. Chennai is so modest you wouldn't even know it's an economic powerhouse, much less a queen of showbiz: India's fourth-largest city is also its most humble.

Languages:
Hindi is spoken as a mother tongue by about 20% of the population, mainly in the area known as the Hindi-belt, the cow-belt or BIMARU, which includes Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh. This Indic language is the official language of the Indian government and the states already mentioned, plus Haryana and Himachal Pradesh.

Urdu is the state language of Jammu and Kashmir. Along with Hindi, it evolved in early Delhi. While Hindi was largely adopted by India's Hindu population, the Muslims embraced Urdu, and so the latter is written in the Perso-Arabic script and includes many Persian words.An ancient Dravidian language at least 2000 years old, and the state language of Tamil Nadu. It is spoken by around 65 million people.

Spoken by nearly 200 million people (mostly in what is now Bangladesh), and the state language of West Bengal. Developed as a language in the 13th century. Kashmiri speakers account for about 55% of the population of Jammu and Kashmir. It is an Indic language written in the Perso-Arabic script. A product of British rule, English is still widely spoken and written in most Indian states 50 years after independence.

Over 2000 years old, Kannada is spoken by over twenty million people worldwide and is the official language of the state of Karnataka. An Indic language dating back to around the 13th century, Marathi is the state language of Maharashtra.State language of Gujarat, it is an Indic language. Telugu is the Dravidian language spoken by the largest number of people; it is the state language of Andhra Pradesh.

Malayalam is also a Dravidian language; it's the state language of Kerala.An Indic language, this is the state language of Punjab. Although based on Devanagari (the same script as Hindi), it is written in a 16th-century script known as Gurumukhi, which was created by the Sikh guru, Guru Angad.