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When the postman knocked
DID THE time-gun fire at 4 p.m. or 8 p.m. (Miscellany, March 4)? Several items of mail and a number of telephone calls have still not resolved the issue, the honours appearing to be equally divided.
One 4 p.m. proponent whose father was someone senior in Fort St. George, remembers being driven after school to the Fort every day and waiting in his father's room till it was time to go home. "And every afternoon sitting in that room, I heard the cannon go off. It was 4 p.m." Another who insists it was 8 p.m., writes, "Just before 8 p.m. every evening, Father would ask everyone to be quiet and he would turn off the radio. When the cannon went off, he would set the clocks in the house at 8 p.m."
Reader T. M. Sundararaman takes another tack. "I don't know whether it was 4 or 8 p.m., but I can recall that exactly at 4-00 p.m. every day during the 1950s and 1960s, the Telegraph Offices all over the country would get the signal from the Poona Observatory to set right their clocks and at this hour all Morse code machines would be kept silent to get the signal from Poona. Probably the time-gun might have been fired to indicate 4.00 p.m." Be that as it may, let's move on; I'll next refer to this only when I get what seems like a definitive answer.
Meanwhile, a neighbour who had, by coincidence, done the Nava Tirupathi circuit the weekend preceding my reference (Miscellany, March 4) dropped in to tell me that visitors should also include in the circuit the temple at Thirukurangkudi, the `native place' of the TVS family. This ancient temple, with its two Perumals, and Shiva in the sanctrum in between, has also been splendidly restored by the family, he tells me, and, with the daily poojas being held regularly, draws a large crowd of worshippers.
And there was a clarification from `Manna' V. Srinivasan (Miscellany, March 4): "The house which was the residence of Maharajapuram Viswanatha Iyer is adjacent to the portion at present owned by the Mahotsava Sabha. Both portions constituted the original house of the Tyagaraja family before it was partitioned."
S. MUTHIAH
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