Madras miscellany

Getting about the city

'THE London A to Z' (ed) is probably the most popular atlas in the world. The London cabby's Bible, it is also the most frequent companion of the visitor to the most visited city in the world. And there's hardly a home in the British capital and many more outside it that is likely to be without the trusted perennial that locates every road and mews, every institution and virtually every building in that vast urban agglomeration.

I'd always wanted to do an atlas like that for Madras in those two decades I flirted with cartography, but circumstances conspired against me. And then, just as I was settling into a quieter life, who should turn up but Vikram Lal of Eicher's, Delhi, the tractor people. His dream was to have such atlases prepared for every metro in India and several other big cities. It'll always be a regret that I could not help him, but I did suggest that he contact Lt. Gen. (Retd.) S. M. Chadha, who had just then retired as the Surveyor General of India and who had been dreaming on the same lines. That meeting led to the publishing by Eicher five or six years ago of the nearest thing to an A to Z (ed) in India - but it was of what, from Lal's and Chadha's points of view, was the logical place to be prioritised, Delhi. From my point of view, I'd have been delighted if they'd worked on Madras first, for it was here that surveying and mapmaking got its beginnings in India. It was in the seas off Tamil Nadu that James Rennell first worked, it was from Madras that William Lambton started his Great Trigonometrical Survey and it was Madras's Colin Mackenzie who went on to become the first Surveyor General of India.

But if Madras has had to wait for Delhi, it's not only been looked at before other metros, but the wait has been worth it. Eicher's Chennai City Map, with the area covered divided into 128 pages, has been available in the city these past few weeks but is being officially launched this evening, with Lal and Chadha in attendance. You might not find the Officer's Training Academy or the Integral Coach Factory in it, Delhi continuing to be paranoiac about security in a day and age when satellites reveal even car numbers on the road, but you'll certainly find even some of the remotest of roads in the city and suburbs with a system of numbering in place too. The atlas may be a bit unwieldy in size, it may in some pages be too crowded and some of its type may be too small, but for its sheer volume of information, gathered from a painstaking road by road ground survey, it is as comprehensive as any user would want.

Taking in Greater Madras from Ennore to Injambakkam on the coast and up to Avadi, Poonamallee and Tambaram in the west, this is a more detailed effort than the first attempts at 'A to Zing' the city that have appeared in the last couple of years in the shape of the 'Naviga for Chennai' and the 'Chennai Street Pages.' Certainly it is a professional job well done by a team of former Survey of India members who, I hope, in retirement have discovered the shackles that map-makers in the private sector have had to contend with all these years, leaving India way behind in a field where, in modern surveying and map-making, it was one of the pioneers.

Rs. 200 is certainly a reasonable price for the well-indexed 208- page book, but in a country still to become map-conscious, will there be the buyers in their thousands? Eicher's are confident, their Delhi atlas has sold over a lakh of copies in the past five or six years, they point out.

A destination for medicare

MADRAS HAS, for a few years now, been gaining a reputation as being the medical capital of India, but with more and more patients coming here from other South Asian countries, it could well be called the medical capital of South Asia before long. And with patients also increasing in number from West and Southeast Asia, it could well be a major medical node in the Indian Ocean region.

But now it is being looked at with interest by patients from further afield. NRIs looking at less expensive healthcare and more familiar surroundings where a fair amount of helpful support is available. have, on numerous occasions, chosen Madras's medical facilities - and understandably so.

But for the British, Continental Europeans and the Americans to make the passage to hospitals in India with their excellent medical staff and facilities at cheaper costs it will still take some time. But it will happen, several in the medical corporate world are confident. The trickle, they point out, has begun with the occasional patient.

One such patient recently walked into Sankara Nethralaya virtually unannounced and was treated for cataract in both the eyes. Fred Wade had found the £ 5,500 the operations would cost in England beyond his purse but heard from his GP that a patient of his had had successful eye surgery in India. Could he consider it, wondered Wade and found himself getting in touch with the Indian who had his surgery done in Bombay. On the flight to Bombay, however, the Indian stewardess who learnt of the reason for Wade's trip mentioned Sankara Nethralaya as the place to go; her mother had had her cataract surgery there and how happy she'd been with the aftercare. And so Wade headed for Madras where, in conversation at the hotel desk, he heard that the Sales Manager had had eye surgery done at Sankara Nethralaya. A call from him, and Wade was given an early date. Since the successful operations, Wade has been spreading the word in England about how it is less expensive to fly to India and get good surgery done there rather than getting it done at home - and that in a place like Sankara Nethralaya, the paying patient makes it possible for a person who cannot pay to receive treatment.

As the small number of such patients - and the larger numbers of NRIs - spread the word about the high quality of medicare in Madras, I can see larger numbers from the West making use of Madras's medi-facilities.

Whether that's what we want to happen, is a different question.

When the postman knocked

A LETTER I received the other day had the writer rather embarrassedly beginning with a report of the loss of a book and then going on to seek the information the book might have held for him. "It's never happened to me before," he writes abashedly, describing leaving the book in a trolley at the Madras International Airport when he entered the Emigration enclosure. Distressing him even more than the loss of the book, has been a loss of faith. "Being a library book and with the library's address in the book, I thought whoever had picked it up would post it to the library after he/ she'd finished reading it. But perhaps I'm expecting too much from people these days," he rues.

The book itself, a piece of fiction, "Talwar" by Robert Carter, is not a particularly important book, my correspondent writes, but figuring in it was a VIP of Olde Madras, George Pigot. "I had just started reading the book about the time you had written of that Winter's Night when there took place Madras's first coup (Miscellany, July 9) and when I lost it, I was left wondering whether there'd be a description of the second, whose victim was, I think, Lord Pigot, wasn't he?" wonders this old-timer.

He was. George Pigot served as Governor of Madras twice. The first time was from 1755 to 1767 and it was an achievement-filled tenure. He was responsible for enlarging the fort and building it to more or less the shape and extent it now has. Over 10,000 men and women laboured on the construction and Pigot daily spent much time supervising their work. Together with Stringer Lawrence, he led Madras through de Lally's 67-day siege in 1758-59. He razed the first 'Black Town', developed the Esplanade in its place and monitored the growth of the new 'Black Town,' today's George Town. He built the Town Wall and proposed the tax that gave Wall Tax Road its name. He ordered the battle be taken to the French in Pondicherry and established British supremacy in the Carnatic. And he held off Hyder Ali's raids on Madras.

He returned to England a wealthy man and used his Madras contacts to become wealthier. His record in Madras and his wealth helped him get an Irish peerage as well as a second posting to Madras. He returned as Governor in 1775 and was shocked by the degree of corruption that had grown in the years he'd been away. Paul Benfield, the master builder to whom he had given a start, was now demanding that the Rs. 23 lakh that the dispossessed Rajah of Tanjore owed the Nawab of Carnatic, be paid directly to him (Benfield) to settle a fraction of what the Nawab owed him! To quell such demands and stem the tide of corruption, Lord Pigot planned to arrest the Commander-in-Chief, Sir Robert Fletcher, who with his cronies supported Benfield's claims as well as the Nawab's to the Tanjore kingdom.

But before he could act, Fletcher ordered Pigot arrested and Col. Stuart did so one August morning in 1776, stopping his coach on the road across the Island between Government House and the Fort, when he was travelling to begin the day's work.

Pigot was imprisoned in a house once occupied by Stringer Lawrence in St. Thomas' Mount - one version is that it was where the Geological Survey buildings have come up - and died there on 11.5.1777. George Stratton, who took over as Governor, Fletcher, Stuart and several others later faced charges, including charges of murder, but all they were found guilty of was misdemeanours and ordered to pay fines of £ 1,000 each! The affairs of Fort St. George quietened down after that - until more recent times.

S. MUTHIAH

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