Chennai a hub for Koreans

Thanks to becoming the hub for automobile company Hyundai and for another electronic giant, Samsung, Chennai is the unofficial capital of South Korea in India. Today, some 4000 Koreans live there, having mixed and blended into the city of Chennai, bringing in their cuisine, culture and even art to the Chennai society.

It all started when Hyundai set up its first automobile plant at Iruganttukotai emerging to become  one of the company’s largest production facilities in the world. Around Hyundai, many more ancillary units have come up; ditto for Samsung and its ancillary units. This has naturally led to a lot of employees coming to stay and work in Chennai. Most of them stay around the beach areas as they have a unified love for the sea though only second to golf.  Quite a few of them also stay closer to the Sriperumbudur area, south of Chennai city, where most of the Korean companies are clustered. For daily affairs, they have evolved a system of communication that is a unique a mishmash of Tamil, English and a bit of Korean.

A lot of Korean restaurants have also cropped up in the city and you enter any one of them, you feel you are experiencing Korea with private dining spaces and cubicles each with its buzzer to ring for service. The Inko Center in the posh Boat Club area, supported by Korean bigwigs, is a cultural melting pot, with the center offering Korean language courses, Taekwondo and exhibiting lots of art and culture.

This is how it is. One community goes to another country for work and takes with it, its unique set of identity and assimilates into the local culture. This is how diversity is nurtured.