When the postman knocked…

* Justice Ar. Lakshmanan tells me that the newspaper reports about narcoanalysis etc. that this column referred to (Miscellany, June 29) were not quite correct. The Law Commission had received representations on the subject from the Forensic Science Society of India and was also aware of Dr. Chandra Sekharan’s view. But it had also received strong views to the contrary. The Commission was taking all views into consideration, examining the matter thoroughly, and will in due course make its recommendations; no recommendations have been made till date, he states.

* Several readers have pointed out that the computing devil must have been at work in getting film pioneer Venkaiah’s (Miscellany, June 29) death to be in the 1980s. It should have been in the 1940s; in fact, he passed away in 1942, I’m told by one of my correspondents.

* The reach of the Net, the readers it generates for this column, and the linkages it brings about constantly amaze me. This time it was Simon Stanley from London referring to my piece ‘A search for judicial history’ (Miscellany, January 1, 2009) and hoping to catch up with “a long-lost distant cousin (whom) I have never met.” Diana Wheeler, the cousin, was who inspired my piece about Sir Edmond Stanley, a Chief Justice of the Madras Supreme Court. And Simon Stanley gives her one of the answers she was seeking. Sir Edmond did not die in Madras (though Lady Stanley might well have); he retired to England in 1825 and died in Surrey in 1843. Before coming to Madras in 1816 as a Judge of the Supreme Court, Sir Edmond had served as the Recorder of Penang. Born in Ireland in 1760 in an Anglo-Irish family, he grew up there, became a lawyer, served as an MP in the Irish Parliament before its abolition, then as First Sergeant (a senior law officer) of Ireland, and was knighted in 1807. But what did he do in those ten years he spent in Madras? That’s what Wheeler, Stanley and I would like to know. Perhaps some good soul doing solid research in the Tamil Nadu Archives will come up with some answers.

* A. Raman, writing from Australia on his continuing search into Madras’s past — to the benefit of this column — says he came across the name Paramananda Mariadassou (1870-1947) recently and learned that he was the first MD from Pondicherry. He apparently also taught traditional medicine. Both Raman and I wonder whether readers have any more information about this doctor from Pondicherry.

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