Pachaiyappas College

This place has been on Poonamallee High Road in Aminjikarai for a very long time. It is a big old building, number 113, and you can't really miss it if you are driving through that part of Chennai. The walls are thick and have that old smell that buildings get after decades of students passing through the halls. Every morning, the gates are crowded with young people coming in for their classes. It is a busy place with a lot of noise from the main road always leaking into the front courtyard. We have many different departments and classrooms spread out across the grounds. Some of the rooms are quite large with high ceilings, and they can get pretty warm in the afternoons when the sun is hitting the bricks. The staff room is usually a mess of papers and books, which is just how things go in a school like this. We don't have the fancy new facilities you might see in those expensive private colleges, but there is a lot of history in the floors and the wooden desks. People here just get on with their work, whether it is teaching or studying for exams. It is a bit of a maze if you aren't used to it, with staircases that lead to different wings and long corridors that always seem to be full of life. It’s an old institution that just keeps going year after year, no matter how much the city around it changes.