Mambakkam Temple Tank (Waterbodies of Chennai - 3)

It's a beautiful pond surrounded by shady trees and an ancient temple. The villagers have used this pond for many years for drinking and bathing. Alas! The city's expansion and the aftermath of urbanization lead the trees to vanish and have high-rise buildings in their place. Now, the pond is no more scenic beauty than it used to be 10-15 years ago. The villagers rarely use this pond nowadays. We can only hope that the real estate gang would not take control of this pond too and destroy the remaining beauty of the village.

This pond belongs to Muruganatheeswara temple. It's a later Pandya period temple in Mambakkam village. Mambakkam is a quiet village located 20 km from Tambaram on the southern outskirts of Chennai city.

Happy travelling.

Note: As per a report, there were about 650+ waterbodies in the Chennai region till the 1980s. Today, only a fraction of them exist. And most of those surviving waterbodies hardly have water, and even some of them that have water have been poorly shrunk. In Chennai, there are tank roads without tanks nearby and lake view roads without any lake nearby. There is a high possibility that even the few waterbodies we have today might vanish soon. I decided to visit the currently surviving waterbodies of Chennai and its suburbs and write about them in my blog as a series.