Noted historian and Chennai chronicler V Sriram has written an article in The Hindu about Ambattur. In it, he says:
Ambattur OT. What is OT? I always understood it to be Old Town. There is an Old Town Park there and also an Old Town Road. But some of the permutations that came up were interesting, to say the least. One was that there was an overhead tank and that was why the place came to be called OT. The next and the most plausible was that it stood for Old Terminus. The person who sent me this information was convincing enough in his argument — he was a resident of the area for over 40 years and nowhere had he seen this sign but on bus boards. He claimed that the concept of OT was a recent one and came about only because a new bus terminus was built.
O.T. bus stand
O.T. refers to the Ambattur O.T. bus stand. It was a big square with numerous shops all around it. It had the MTH (CTH) road coming from Chennai and leaving towards Avadi. It had two main roads North Park Street going towards Menambedu/Prithivipakkam, and South Park Street going towards Ambattur railway station. There is another road Mounaswamy Mutt Road, which links to Vijayalakshmipuram. (The famed Bombay Sisters got their name from this mouna swami.)
Despite its name, O.T. was not a bus stand. For decades, it was just a bus stop. There was a big power transformer in the middle of the square. Buses would go around the transformer and stop at designated places to drop off and pick up passengers. One would think OT stood for overturn. Some buses went around the church and did a mega overturn.
After Jayalalitha introduced the J and V series of bus routes for Pallavan Transport Corporation (PTC), O.T. became a proper bus stop. The new routes quickly gained notoriety for being accident-prone as the driver were encouraged to drive fast on these limited-stops routes. The buses would stop for 10-20 minutes while the crew had refreshments and checked in with a tiny PTC counter.
Even after the introduction of the new routes, there was no shelter for passengers. Now, the transformer is gone and there is a big shelter. The new shelter takes almost all the space in the O.T. There is a median in the narrow section of the CTH and buses cannot do a overturn. There is an extremely roundabout roundabout if you come from Chennai and want to go North Park Street.
The suffix O.T.
O.T. stands for to Old Terminus. Now, that begs the question where the New Terminus was. There is no New Terminus now. If there is no new terminus, why is O.T. called the old terminus?
Well, there was a New Terminus. It was on South Park Street, some distance behind the Girls High School.
Unlike the O.T. square, the New Terminus was just a two-way lane. There was no designated stop or stand. PTC buses stopped wherever they wanted. They parked themselves wherever there was empty space. The crew used to take excruciatingly long breaks there. The new terminus was inconvenient for passengers. As more buses were to be introduced, the New Terminus was destined to become congested. PTC decided to shift to O.T. and that is how O.T. regained its preeminence.
Ambattur OT also has competition from the Ambattur Industrial Estate, which is in another pincode. Ambattur Estate has a PTC depot. Sometimes, PTC buses would shorten their trips to Ambattur OT and instead stop at Ambattur Estate. The bus number would have a diagonal slash when they did this. In all likelihood, OT was an invention of PTC rather than the town authorities.
Old Town?
Sriram thinks that O.T. refers to ‘Old Town’ and cites the existence of such references in The Hindu archives. If this was true, then there should be a New Town. None exists. If there was an Ambattur Old Town, it would have been around the forever congested railway station. In the New Terminus days, the areas around O.T. was not so dense as the railway station area. The administrative areas of Ambattur is huge, covering several pin codes and stretching all the way from the borders of Anna Nagar to Thirumullaivayal to Puzhal Lake to Ambattur Lake. If at all Old Town exists in government documents, it must be an endearing way to refer to Ambattur proper.
Ambattur was a village. For miles from the railway station, it was just paddy fields. After Ambattur Industrial Estate was established, migrant workforce started settling in the Ambattur village. Dunlop already had a big factory in Ambattur and so did a few other prominent industrial groups of India. (For decades, it was rumoured that the promoters of Ambattur industries lobbied to prevent the inclusion of the town inside the ever-expanding borders of Madras City, as it would impose higher taxes and wages.)
The source of confusion
In the past, Indian journalists have provided new spin to old words. In some cases, they have turned the truth on its head. The word communal used to have the opposite meaning. A communal kitchen was a common kitchen used by multiple castes or religions. In olden days, there were separate pandhies for different communities or there were no pandhi for 'outsider' communities. Communal kitchens were advertised as such for feasts during marriage or funeral ceremonies, or in times of disasters such as cyclones, flooding and earthquakes.
As journalists are typically prohibited from using abbreviations, they may have unintentionally contributed to this self-fulfilling Old Town myth. They followed their style guides to a T! That is the most likely explanation.
Old Town Park may have come into existence after a new town park was constructed. Similarly, Old Town Road may have been coined after a new town road was constructed. The usage may have died off. Old Town Park seems to be further way in Venkatapuram. God knows where Old Town Road is.
In any case, nobody in Ambattur refers (or referred) to the O.T. bus stand area as Old Town.