Not many know that the Queen Elizabeth II arrived in Madras decades before the much spoken about 1997 visit to the sets of actor Kamal Hassan’s film Marudhanayagam (which never got made), when the city had got its new name Chennai.
Rewind to February 19, 1961. Thousands of people dotted the city’s roads along the 30-km route from the Madras airport in Meenambakkam to the heart of the city to give a spectacular welcome to the Queen Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh when they set foot here.