Worship is work

If you haven't been to the Kapaleeshwarar temple for a few years, you will be surprised to see how this establishment has grown - literally. What I remember as being a ground-and-first floor agraharam-kind of shop is now a three storeyed modern building. That's reflective of how Giri Trading Agency has itself grown, especially in the past decade or so. Considering they have been in Chennai for just about thirty-four years now, their growth has been quietly phenomenal.

The organisation is itself older, going back to the 1950s. But it began in Bombay, not in Madras, though it did have very strong Madras roots from the day it was born - or even before. Like many others of his generation, TVS Giri Iyer had moved from Madras to Bombay, looking for work. One day, he wanted to gift a friend's son a sandhya vandanam book for the boy's sacred thread ceremony. Not finding any such publication catering to the Madrasi's need for specific religious texts and puja material, Giri Iyer sensed a business opportunity. On his next visit to Madras, he bought several such books and started selling them at the Matunga railway station. It was certainly not roses all the way, but believing that he was on to a good thing, he had all his nine children help him with the business. The boys were based in Madras to source the material and transport them to Bombay, while the girls handled the sales and distribution there. In 1976, they opened a 200-square foot showroom right at the entrance to the Kapaleeshwarar temple.

That decision coincided with a rise in the demand cycle for religious items - and the nature of the items also began to diversify. Apart from the books, devotional music casettes began to rise in popularity. In the early 1980s, they began a separate division to cater to the music business. From that time on, there has been no looking back; with increasing global mobility, the demand for pre-packaged puja items and quasi-traditional merchandise like bharatanatyam costumes began to come in from around the world. Today, many of Giri Iyer's grandchildren are active in running the various businesses, through their showrooms as well as their online portal (where you can even download a religious ringtone for your mobile phone!). All those businesses add up to an annual turnover of around Rs.20 crores - all of which has grown from the Rs.300 worth of books that Giri Iyer took with him to Bombay!

An old chapel

In the early days of its occupation of Madras, the British East India Company was nervous about admitting British missionaries into their possessions. This was because they were worried about having to deal with maverick British traders entering the region pretending to be missionaries, but with the goal of breaking the Company's monopoly over the India-Britain trades. Believing they would have a free hand to punish imposters of other nationalities, they allowed French (Roman Catholic) and German (Protestant) missionaries to go about preaching to the natives.

That's how Benjamin Schultze, a German Lutheran, became the first Protestant missionary in Madras. Though he had come to Tranquebar (Tharangambady) in 1719, it was only in July 1726 that he arrived at Madras and began work in the 'Black Town' area outside Fort St George. Needing more space, he requested his employer, the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK) to buy up a garden house, where the Chennai Central Station stands today. That garden house was, in 1719, the subject of a petition by Antonio de Carvalho da Silva who claimed that it was bequeathed to her by her grandfather, Joao Pereira de Faria (John Pereira). The whole area around it was called John Pereira's Gardens, so there seemed to be some merit to her claim. Fort St George however, took a stand that their agent, Mr. Foxcroft, had in 1671 let the area to John Pereira to farm for 31 years and it belonged to them, even if they hadn't repossessed the place. Finally, the Council directed that John Pereira's Gardens be leased out for 11 years. Though the gardens had within them a tiled house and a sort of chapel near it, the property did not find too many takers, as it had fallen into disuse and had become a refuge for gamblers, who used the space for cock-fighting.

Probably the SPCK got it cheap at the end of that 11-year lease period. But they too did not take any interest in developing the property, most likely because it was outside the walls of the Fort and directly in the line of Hyder Ali's maurading armies. Even the building of a wall did not make the Garden any more desirable; the SPCK too seemed to have forgotten that they owned this property. It was only in 1826 that Rev. J.Ridsdale began to take an interest in this space and began work to construct a chapel - the older "...small Tyl'd house with a sort of Chappell..." having been destroyed during one of the many skirmishes of the previous century. The Trinity Chapel opened its doors to the public in 1831 - Rev. Ridsdale seems to have died soon after. Somewhere in all the furore, it is said, the chapel was never formally consecrated. No matter; for after all these years, it doesn't really need to be consecrated, does it?!

Eating-room

It looks like a hole in the wall, but like many establishments on NSC Bose Road, it probably opens up a lot once you get inside. Even then, this eatery is normally chock-full during lunch hours on weekdays, for it is widely regarded as a value-for-money joint, especially by those from north India. The lunch menu is standardised and quite workmanlike - roti, rice, dal and vegetables - so one does not have to waste time choosing from a menu. The portions are unlimited, which is just what the bachelors need - a midday meal that fills them up well into the next day.

Somehow, nobody seems to have told them that there is no Bombay any more; there is a bunch of people who do not like that word being used these days. Surely they wouldn't say a word against this 'eating room'!

Different, with similarities

It is said of us that we don't value history when it is all around us; like the villagers near the site of Harappa who did not realize the historic significance of the bricks from their village which were used as ballast by British railway engineers, many of us remain unaware of the history around us, just because it has always been around us. Add to it a tradition of transmitting information verbally rather than through any records and it becomes difficult to separate fact from legend.

The Madhava Perumal temple in Mylapore is steeped in legend. Depending on who you listen to, the temple goes back to the days of Vyasa - the 8th century BCE - or around 800 years, according to records available with the temple authorities. The four-pillared mandapam in front of the temple, which is a feature of Pallava temple construction, supports the latter estimate. For its age, the temple is quite well maintained, though not as crowded as one would expect given its antiquity and imbued holiness. In that aspect, it falls behind the Kapaleeshwarar temple, which is also of roughly similar stature.

Though the deities at the two temples are starkly different (Siva as Kapaleeswarar and Vishnu as Madhava Perumal), both of them have the same tree - the punnai (Calophyllum inophyllum) as the sthala vriksham (sacred tree)!

A newer vintage

It does look really old, but my guess is that it hasn't yet crossed the century mark. From what I understand, mixed-use buildings - with shops at the ground level and living quarters above - in Madras of the late 19th century and the early 20th century were fashioned slightly differently. Not from a functional point of view, much of that did not change until probably the early 1980s. If the straight line of the tiles in front is broken by a gable-like structure, that (to me, in my limited understanding) is indicative of a turn-of-the-20th-century house. Sometimes, those houses would have more than one such gable, but even a single gable is a give-away.

A house like this one is probably at least a generation later. The later part of the 1920s was when it became fashionable to have images of gods and godesses built into the facade (Gandhi Peak being a great example). This building does not have the soaring vision of the Gandhi Peak, but it does find space for the Lord Krishna flanked by Lakshmi and Saraswati. The cherub is probably to emphasize that it is not a religious building, but a fashionable one, rather.

Guess it has to wait a bit for that century, still!

Expensive pause

The first automated parking meters in Chennai came up sometime in October last year. Four of them were installed in Mylapore's North Mada Street, where parking has traditionally been quite haphazard. They haven't done away with the parking attendent completely, however. The idea with these meters is to pay the money for the duration you intend parking and leave that ticket on your vehicle's dashboard. The parking attendent's job is to make sure that all parked vehicles show off a valid ticket on their dashboards.

Theoretically, it is meant to tighten up cash collections and reduce the risk of parking attendants losing - or being robbed of - the fee they collect through the day. The Corporation hasn't yet released any results of how things have changed in the three months this system has been in operation at Mylapore, T.Nagar and Taramani, but I'm guessing they will not be in a hurry to rip these out and go back to the attendant-only system, which was being run by the Tamil Nadu Ex-servicemen Corporation (TEXCO). The firm supplying these parking meters is getting ready to install them at a dozen more locations.

One aspect that has gone almost unnoticed is that the parking fee has, from one perspective, gone up six-fold: earlier, TEXCO's authorised rate was Rs.5 for a maximum of six hours. It has now become Rs.5 for every hour - and you can park in one slot for only 3 hours at a stretch!

Eclipse in a box

Not wanting to be bothered with 'special sunglasses' to view the eclipse today, we just used a shoebox as a pinhole camera to watch the shadow of the moon cross the sun's face. And it did give us a rather good view of the eclipse's progress, though we had to keep moving the shoebox constantly to make sure it caught the sun's rays.

The astronomers of the Madras Presidency, during the 19th century, were considerably better equipped. They had state-of-the-art equipment at their command, for the British knew that accurate astronomical observations would directly help in better navigation - and also for better understanding the geography of the subcontinent which was now under their control. As part of these observations, the astronomers would also study the solar eclipses. It was only the later half of the 1800s that these observations laid the foundation for solar physics, a hitherto unknown branch of science.

More specifically, it was the total eclipse of Augst 18, 1868 which set off the spark for the new science. In a display of scientific cooperation, the team from the Madras Observatory was joined by an addtional team of British astronomers, as well as a team of their French counterparts, to study that eclipse. Observing the event from different locations in and around Madras, the teams found their spectrometers displaying a bright yellow line, which could not be explained away as sodium. It was based on these observations that Pierre Janssen and Norman Lockyer deduced the existence of Helium, leading to both of them being jointly credited as having discovered that element - though it is almost forgotten that it was the Madras Observatory which set it up for them*.

Our observations from the shoebox did give us a lot of fun; no new elements were discovered in the process, however!

* Though Janssen made his readings at Guntur and Lockyer at Vijaydurg, all the arrangements for observing this eclipse - and subsequent ones - were made by the Madras Observatory, which was the leading, if not the only, astronomical observatory in India at that time.