So much has been written about RV’s public life, that there is very little to add. Let us look at other aspects that throw light on the man.

R. Venkataraman

The face they say is the index of the mind. So does a person’s handwriting give a clue to the person. RV had both, a very gentle and benign face, but even more striking was his handwriting. It was copybook, which any convent would be proud of!

For some of us who had the unique privilege of working with him, the one fact that remains etched in memory after so many years is his clear, bold and legible handwriting, each letter well formed and rounded, with no trace of hurry or confusion of thought while recording his views on files. This continued almost till the end. I can vouch for it as I got him to sign my copy of My Presidential Years when he was in his eighties. My regret is that I broke my cardinal rule of not lending my books and, in that momentary lapse, I lost RV’s book along with his signature. The borrower is no more, RV is gone and with that the chance of getting his signature again. My only consolation is a photograph, taken by me, of his house in Thanjavur.

RV led a full life. Lawyer, freedom fighter, labour leader, politician, minister, international civil servant, and, finally, Head of State. In all these situations his handwriting never changed. The burden of office or pressure of work or the competing demands on his time were never reflected in a change of handwriting. It was the same clear, bold and legible writing, giving the impression he was a man of leisure. It showed an orderly mind, clear of thought and precise in what he wanted to convey. None would be able to contradict this.

It was always a pleasure to meet him, which I did fairly regularly when he lived in Chennai after demitting office as President. Unfailing courtesy was his second nature, even in those days when he had to deal with officials. This was so noticeable, when, as Chairman of Kalak­shetra, between 1992 and 2006, he always made it a point to be present when senior artistes performed, and took the trouble of honouring them personally, ­despite failing eyesight and ­advancing years, notwithstanding the high office he had held.

An episode that did the rounds when RV was associated with the Government of Tamil Nadu is worth recollecting. (I have written about this in an earlier issue of Madras Musings.) A foreign firm had tendered to ­supply textile machinery to units that were being set up in Tamil Nadu with financial assistance from the government. In the course of negotiations, the firm suggested that they were willing to offer a ‘consideration’ if the order went in their favour. The Minister-in-charge turned down what he felt was a preposterous suggestion and told the firm that, instead, they should supply an extra unit of machinery, equivalent to the amount of ‘consideration’ they were prepared to part with. The Minister’s response sounds like fiction today. Any guesses who the Minister was!!

Glimpses of little known aspects of the man tell us that it is RV who lent lustre to every office he held. A fitting tribute to him will be to preserve for posterity his ancestral home as a National Monument, and embellish it with a pictorial biography of his many-faceted and rich life, supplemented with select arte­facts from his collection.

With his passing away, public life is the poorer, the sophistication that he brought and the unwavering commitment to play the game by its rules becoming scarce, an urgent reminder for all those operating the levers of power.

A poem for computer  users over fifty

A Computer was something on TV
From a science fiction show of note,
A Window was something you hated to clean
And Ram was the father of a goat.

Meg was the name of my girlfriend
And Gig was a job for the night
Now they all mean different things
And that really Mega Bytes.

An Application was for employment,
A Program was a TV show,
A Cursor used profanity,
A Keyboard was a piano.

A Memory was something that you lost with age,
A CD was a bank account,
And if you had a 3-inch floppy
You hoped nobody found out.

Compress was something you did to the garbage
Not something you did to a file,
And if you Unzipped anything in public
You’d be in jail for a while.

Log On was adding wood to the fire,
Hard Drive was a long trip on the road,
A Mouse pad was where a mouse lived,
And a Backup happened to your commode.

Cut’s what you did with a pocket Knife,
Paste you did with glue,
A Web was a Spider’s home
And a Virus was the flu.

I guess I’ll stick to my pad and paper
And the Memory in my head.
I hear nobody’s been Killed in a Computer crash
But when it happens they wish they were dead.

I have always wondered how owners choose the names of their shops, restaurants and other business establishments. Some simple and uncomplicated folks just pick a god’s name, while others make do with the names of a mother/wife/child, so we have Geetha cafes, Vijaya tea stalls and Murugan stores in ­almost every locality in Chennai. Some who do not want their father’s long name on the sign board (who probably funded the whole enterprise anyway) call it SM stores or PK textiles or by some other initials. I guess the guy who calls his bakery Chicago Bakery has several reasons – he could have been an Al Capone fan, an automobile aficionado or was probably thinking it was pronounced as chickago (a common mistake) and thought it sounded tres chic or chick.

There was a chicken stall owner in my locality (euphemistically called protein shop, so as not to  offend the vegans) who obviously cherished his kindergarten days enough to call it Chubby Chicks. Frankly, I thought it was droll flippancy but some others didn’t find it funny and he was soon persuaded to change to a staid local name. Among all these exotic names, the one I remember with great fondness is the one that flashes in all its neon glory against my mental firmament: The Eskimo Restaurant.

Ethereal food it was that drew my friend and me here regularly. We had finished our final Boards and as convent schools worked on a Jan-Dec schedule and ­colleges opened in May, we were totally footloose. Our parents were not particularly worried about the six month loss of scholastic pursuit because as Senior Cambridge students (as we snobbishly called ourselves, while in reality our Board was actually called ICSE) we were permitted to skip the Pre Univ course (P.U.C.) and would be admitted by the college directly into the first year of the Bachelor course if you got a First Class. My friend and I (rather tiring to keep calling her that, so I will choose the letter S to identity her) had decided the two courses to take for our future – if we got a first class we would do B.A. and if we didn’t we would run away to Auroville. We were not driven by any esoteric needs; it was just that the fear of facing the wrath of our parents put the idea into our heads. Besides, on our ­budget, Pondicherry was the ­farthest we could run!

Our parents in their wisdom, and like Indian parents everywhere, decided we should not waste our time while waiting for our results and admission to ­college. Cookery classes were anathema to us and doll-making would have been a disaster, so, after much pondering and protest, we were packed off for typewriting and shorthand classes. My father located an ­institute on Wallajah Road which would serve both of us, ­located as it was midway between S’s house, which was off Mount Road, behind Amalgamation’s office, and mine in Fort St. George. The classes were from 7 a.m. to 9 a.m. – so we had lost the battle for independence but won the war for freedom. While our fathers got ready for office, we would be out of their way (and any smart kid will tell you that those are crucial minutes when fathers can issue edicts that can ruin your whole day or even life) and for the rest of the day they would be out of our way!

Seven in the morning, I would be the only one solemnly standing at the bus stop outside Fort St.George staring at the rampart walls till the old bus trundled along with only the driver and the conductor in it. The driver would stop rather reluctantly to pick up the lone teenage passenger. He often gave me a life-is-so-unfair-kiddo look, feeling sorry for someone forced out of bed so early for considerations other than livelihood. I put on an appropriate look of martyrdom – would never let him know that it was actually a wonderful start to the day. S would turn up more often later than sooner and we would enter the shorthand class as late as possible,  raising thereby our chances of getting thrown out. Typewriting classes followed and while we typed exciting things about brown dogs and quick foxes for a week we soon decided to enliven our lives and developed ingenuous methods to amuse ourselves. Our master tried hard to train us but gave up on us the day he discovered us using three fingers to type the height of height jokes – some were bawdy, so I shall not repeat them here.

Classes over, we would jauntily walk from Wallajah Road past the red brick Police Asst. Commissioner’s office and past Chellaram’s. We would stroll along Mount Road, fantasising over the Eskimo’s menu and discuss, as if our lives depended on it, what we would order once we got there. S and I had sold our mothers the sob story of how hungry we were after class and the buses were too crowded for us to get home for breakfast, so we needed to eat somewhere and eat on time. The somewhere was, of course, Eskimo’s. We walked on past the Central Telegraph Office and suddenly before us would be Eskimo’s. Eski­mo’s as it was fondly called by its ardent fans was in Dhun Building on Mount Road, diagonally opposite Buhari Hotel (which has survived, like some lucky women, the ravages of Time). The entrance to Eskimo’s was located next to a textile shop that had in its windows diaphanous sarees in pastel shades draped through hoops. I don’t remember the name (Khatau/Mafatlal/Cali-cloth ??) as I had absolutely no interest in sarees at the time; it was the accepted outfit of youth for me – denims, cotton smocks and the ubiquitous Kholapuris on my feet. The other side of Eskimo’s entrance, in sharp contrast, had dazzling silks in jewel tones shimmering in the window of Radha Silks.

The glass door of Eskimo’s flaunted its status with the announcement A/C in gold letters, which basically meant that all and sundry were not expected to enter its hallowed premises. In keeping with the fashion of the times not much attention was paid to the decor. To ensure that the Plaster of Paris curling clouds on the ceiling didn’t offend you, the whole restaurant was plunged in semi-darkness. When you stepped in from the harsh and bright sunlight of a normal Madras mid-morn you would get the experience of groping in a dark Italian grotto right here and for free. Once vision adjusted itself, you would see functional tables and chairs strewn around casually. There was a semi-spiral staircase that took you upstairs where there were sofa seats. At the entrance downstairs, behind a tiny counter, sat a cashier and if you were not careful in the dark you would have mistaken him for a fixture – for most days he just sat and glowered at the irreverent teenagers who dared to enter his sacrosanct chambers. We, of course, just swished our long plaits bravely and walked in secure for we knew we had enough to pay for our food.
S and I always went upstairs so we could place our mirror work cloth bags bulging with reams of typed gibberish and the shorthand notebook plus Mr. Pitman’s tome on the sofa and pore over the menu with great diligence.

My favourite, and I never got tired of it, was the Club Sandwich. Statutory warning before you proceed: you may drool, so you are cautioned! The Club Sandwich was layers and layers of Heaven in food form. There were two layers of lavish filling between three thick slices of fresh bread. There was bacon, ham, cheese, eggs, crisp lettuce and oodles of fresh vegetables all exotically dressed in freshly made mayonnaise. The cutlets (not pre-cooked, dehydrated and frozen and microwaved like today) were scrumptious with real breadcrumbs rubbed all over that crumbled as you bit into it. It was not a place where you ordered your food and drummed your fingers to hurry the waiter – it was a place where you entreated for food and waited for it to be bestowed on you.

While we waited, like a devotee reading the prayer book, we diligently pored over the menu excitedly, deciding what we would eat the next day. There were variations of sandwiches, combinations of burgers and juicy hot dogs. Indigenous samosas had been modified with interesting stuffing and there were crisp patties just waiting to be devoured by rapacious teenagers. There were several alluring flavours of milkshakes to slurp it all down with. We had never heard of calories or dieting and never cared about a pimple or two that threatened to pop up due to licentious eating – our mantra was not so much about looking good but feeling good. We felt so GOOD with all that food in our bellies that we lingered on the sofa just lifting our hearts and thanking God for his bounty.

Exiting Eskimo’s reluctantly we had to make a difficult decision, turn right or left? To the right lay the Sapphire movie complex and to the left Casino Theatre. It would be a toss up between the irresistible French charm of Alain Delon in Farewell Friend or Paul Newman (may he rest in peace) and his blue eyes. So while we debated over the difficult choices in life, we never asked one nagging question, for it really didn’t matter anyway – Why Eskimo?

The King Cobra (Ophiophagus hannah, Tamil: Karinagam) 

Snakes are well-known for their steady, unblinking gaze, often mistakenly described as ‘hypnotic’. The fixed stare is because it has no eye-lids. The stare of the king cobra is particularly unique and, once seen, not easily forgotten. Mark O’ Shea, the famous herpetologist, not known for any cloying sentimentality, gives an evocative account of his encounter with a female king cobra he caught in India (Karnataka?). “When testing the senses of this specimen, I turned to find her hooding and gazing directly into my eyes, and when she caught my attention, I saw her pupils focus on my face and she started to sway. I started to sway with her and was sure she was asking me why I had cuaght her. I felt extremely guilty and determined to release her as soon as possible, which I did, in a remote forest creek. It was the most spiritual moment of my life. I am sure she was trying to communicate with me, something I have not experienced with any snake nor expect to do so again”.

The King Cobra

This snake has a deservedly famous reputation for its magnificent looks. And a somewhat undeserved reputation for ferocity.

It does not belong to the same genus as the cobras described last fortnight but to a separate genus, Ophiophagus, which it has all to itself, there being no other snake in this genus anywhere in the world.

In South India, the king cobra is found in the forests of the Western Ghats. It is rare where it occurs but, because of its huge size, is more easily noticed than others.

Its average length is about 10 ft, but the maximum length may be as much as over 15 ft. It is the longest venomous snake in the world. It is also stout-bodied. The principal colours are black, grey, dark olive green or yellowish brown. There are white or yellowish cross bands over the entire length of the body. Bandless forms occur in Arunachal Pradesh.

Its hood is larger and narrower than that of the Indian cobra. Though the hood is impressive, it is not as pretty as that of the Indian cobra.

The snake is found in rain forests, forested stream banks, mangrove swamps bamboo thickets and in tea and coffee estates. Occasionally, it is known to stray into villages bordering forested areas.

There is a belief in Karna­taka that it enters a village to spend its last days and, once a hundred people see it, it will die. The first half of this is quite likely: if the snake is very old or disabled or sick it may be elbowed out by competition in the forest and a nearby village, with a plentiful supply of rats –  which consequently sustain a good population of rat snakes – has its attraction for the sanke-eating King Cobra. The second half of the belief is the icing on the cake.

It has sometimes been heard to make a ‘growling’ sound.

Its principal feed is snakes. Hence its Latin generic name, Ophiophagus, meaning ‘snake-feeder’. A wag has remarked that the king cobra is so called not only because of its regal looks, but also because, like all kings, it feeds on its subjects! It feeds even on its own kind which too, coming to think of it, is a royal trait. Monitor lizards also are eaten.
Its other peculiarity is that it is the only Indian snake that builds a ‘nest’ to lay its eggs. It scrapes together the leaf litter on the forest floor with its body and makes a crude nest. As with the corbas, it stays with the eggs but does not incubate them.

When spreading its hood, it can raise one-third its length, i.e. some three feet, off the ground. This is a truly impressive sight.

It has a reputation for being ‘intelligent’. Though extremely alert at all times, it is slow to attack unless provoked or unless disturbed while guarding its nest. When it decides to attack, it can be very fast. Its venom is less toxic than that of the Indian cobra but this is compensated by the much larger quantity. The average venom yield is 200 – 500 mg while the estimated lethal dose for a human is 12 mg.

There is no antivenin manufactured in India for king cobra bites. But we may draw some comfort from the fact that, in the last over 20 years, only four deaths from its bite have been reported from India, all from South India (according to Whitaker and Captain).

The Banded Krait (Bungarus fasciatus)

The banded krait has a limited distribution in India, unlike the common krait described last fortnight. It is not found in South

The Pit Vipers

Twenty species of pit vipers are found in India. They are all venomous. A pit viper is so called because of a ‘pit’ located between the nostril and the eye. This has a highly specialised function. The membrane in the ‘pit’ is extremely sensitive to heat – to as little as a difference of 0.005° C or, perhaps, even less from the ambient temperature. This helps the nocturnal snake to locate its warm-blooded prey even in pitch darkness and, what is more, strike at it with unerring precision. The only other snakes which have ‘pits’ with a similar function are the pythons which are also nocturnal or mostly nocturnal.

The pit vipers in India are found mostly in the forest areas and plantations and are rarely  come across except by those working in forests and plantations to whom they do pose a threat. The bites occur when the workers pluck tea leaves or coffee berries or do the de-weeding in rubber estates. They are generally slow to strike but when they do strike, they can be fast. Though venomous and capable of inflicting painful bites, authenticated cases of fatalities or life-threatening envenomation have been few or nil. But, the fact is that we know little of the natural history of the pit vipers in general.

Of the twenty occuring in India, nine are common in their ranges. They generally vary in length from one foot to three-and-a-half feet, depeding on the species. A distinctive feature of all of them is the triangular head broader than the neck.

The polyvalent antivenin currently manufactured in India does not cover pit viper bites.

Sea snakes

Almost all the sea snakes of the world occur in the warmer waters – the Indian and Pacific Oceans.

Generally, they measure one-and-a-half to three feet in length. The annulated sea snake (Hydrophis cyanocinctus), found all along the Indian coast and elsewhere, measures 4 ft. to 5 ft. The yellow sea snake (Hydrophis spiralis) found off the Indian coast, as elsewhere, is the largest sea snake of the world reaching a maximum length of over 9 ft.

Most sea snakes bite only if provoked. Some are very reluctant to bite. A few can be aggressive and bite readiy. Accidents happen mostly to fishermen while handling sea snakes caught in the fishing nets or while wading in the shallow waters.

According  to one estimate quoted by Heatwole, a highly regarded authority on sea snakes, in 68% of Sea snake bites no venom is injected. Though the quantity of venom is generally less than in the case of land snakes, in some species like the hook-nosed sea snake and the annulated sea snake it can be large. Heatwole lists seven sea snakes which are known to have caused fatalities worldwide. Of these, six are among the twenty species of sea snakes known from the Indian waters. The six are the hook-nosed sea snake (Enhydrina schistosa), the yellow sea snake (Hydrophis spiralis), the annulated sea snake (Hydrophis cyancinctus), the Cochin banded sea snake (Hydrophis ornatus), the short sea snake (Lapemis curtus) and the black and yellow sea snake (Pelamis platurus).

The hook-nosed sea snake or beaked sea snake (Enhydrina schistosa), the commonest sea snake off the Indian coast and also world-wide, and a comparatively aggressive one, is responsible for the majority of fatalities from sea snakebites. A full bite from this snake has enough of the highly toxic venom that is capable of killing 22 humans.

The polyvalent antivenin currently available in India is not effective for sea snakebites.

(Concluded)

Social history

Neild S.M. (1979) ‘Colonial urbanism: the development of Madras city in the 18th and 19th Centuries’. Modern Asian Studies 13:217–246.

The growth of Madras City illustrates this process of interaction and accommodation, which characterised colonial ­urbanism in Asia. Founded in 1639 by the English East India Company by a village on a sandy shore along the Bay of Bengal, Madras first existed as a colonial trading post remote in culture, objectives, and location from the major centres of contemporary southern India. But its growth and prosperity depended upon its ability to exploit and absorb local commercial, weaving, and agrarian skills, existing social relationships, and even prevailing cultural values. A measure of its success in this effort was the resulting pluralism of its social and spatial structure. 18th and 19th Century Madras was an amalgam of three separate, although overlapping, societies: the suburban villages (that belonged to the precolonial agrarian society of Tondai­mandalam), the predominantly Indian town centres (that had their own links with indigenous urban and rural society but which grew mainly in response to the new colonial trading settlement), and the colonial urban and suburban society (that emerged during the late 18th and early 19th Centuries and reflected British colonial interests and policies). Contemporary Madras is a product of the interaction, mutual dependence, and occasional conflict among these elements of the colonial urban structure.

Individual history

Price P.G. (1983) ‘Warrior caste ‘Raja’ and gentleman ‘Zamindar’: one person’s experience in the late 19th Century’. Modern Asian Studies 17:563–590.

This paper interprets the life experience of a South Indian landholder, Raja Baskara Setupati, at the end of the 19th Century. The basis for interpretation comes from Price’s analysis of the values of political economy among, chiefly, warrior castes as they adjusted to constraints of imperial rule from 1800 in the Madras Presidency. The method of exposition is, for the most part, descriptive and narrative, with the intention of highlighting and contextual­ising major concepts governing the man’s thoughts and actions. Baskara and his brother were moved to Madras, where they received instruction from British tutors and attended Government schools. Baskara mixed with other zamindari boys at a school for minors at Landon’s Gardens.

Viswanathan-Peterson I (1999) ‘The cabinet of King Serfoji of Tanjore: a European collection in early 19th Century India.’ Journal of the History of Collections 11:71–93.

The Indian ruler Serfoji II of Tanjore (r. 1798–1832) was noted for his pursuit of European science, and for his library and collection. This paper traces the history of this unusual Indian collection, reconstructs its intellectual foundations, and  assesses its implications for the history of ideas. It is argued that Serfoji had created a cabinet of science and art on the model of the European Kunstkammer, and that his cabinet bore the stamp of a particular configuration of ideas and practices relating to European science in the 19th Century, transmitted to him through his education under German Pietist missionaries from Halle. The King’s career as a collector illuminates a hitherto unstudied intersection of cultural currents in early 19th Century India, of Pietist Christianity, Enlightenment ideas of science, and Indian responses to European science prior to the entrenchment of British colonial hegemony.

Science history

Stewart R.R. (1982) ‘Missionaries and clergymen as botanists in India and Pakistan.’ Taxon 31:57–64.

Modern botany gained a foothold in India at Tranquebar through Johan Gerhard Koenig (1728-1784), a missionary surgeon. Subsequent references include the contributions of several other European missionary botanists from Jacob Klein (the elder) and C.S. John the Jesuit to K.M. Mathew of recent time.

Thomas A.P. (2006) ‘The establishment of Calcutta Botanic Garden: plant transfer, science and the East India Company.’ Journal of Royal Asiatic Society, Series 3, 16:165–177.

The following comments exist: (1) The first professional botanist to be employed by the Company was Dr. Johan Koenig (1728–85), a student of Linnaeus who worked in Southern India. Koenig died before he was able to achieve much but the post was continued with the appointment of Dr. Patrick Russell. Thus, a pattern of official patronage of botany had been established by 1786, but only in the Madras Presidency; there was no official botanist in Bengal, and a surprising degree of ignorance about its plant life. (2) William Roxburgh was an East India Company surgeon who had made his name as the superintendent of a small botanic garden at Samalkot in the Madras Presidency.

Vicziany M. (1986) ‘Imperialism, botany and statistics in early nineteenth-century India: the surveys of Francis Bucha­nan (1762–1829).’ Modern Asian Studies 20:625–660.

The botanist Francis Buchanan arrived in India in I794 and left in 1815. He was employed by the East India Company for 20 years in a number of capacities, but he is chiefly remembered today for two surveys he conducted: the first of Mysore in 1800 and the second of Bengal in I807. These surveys have long been used by historians, anthropologists and Indian politicians to depict the nature of Indian society in the early years of British rule. Extensive cross citations exist on Bucha­nan’s A Journey from Madras through the countries of Mysore, Canara and Malabar (1807).

Medical history

Kunzru K.M.N. (2006) ‘Western medical education in India: the first medical schools.’ International Congress on the History of Medicine, Scientific Program.
http://www.ishm 2006.hu/scientific/abstract. php?ID=97

A fascinating account of the start of medical schools (colleges) in India in general, but includes several interesting references to the starting of Madras Medical School (later College). It also includes a reference to the first woman surgeon of Madras, Mary Schar­lieb, who was instrumental in starting the Royal Victoria Women’s Hospital in Tripli­cane (popularly known as the Gosha Hospital). Scharlieb first trained as a midwife in Madras, then tried to enrol as a medical student, initially unsuccessfully. She eventually joined Madras Medical College in 1872, qualified in 1875, and became a lecturer in Obstetrics and Gynaecology. On return from the London Medical School for Women, after higher studies in 1885, she headed a women’s and chil­dren’s hospital for two years, and retired because of ill health. This paper also mentions that MD was the only degree in the medical faculty of the University of Madras in 1858. An extremely useful and vital document for those interested in the study of medical history in Madras.