Madras Miscellaney

What's in a road name?

The other day, a bright young thing rang me up and wanted to know what I thought about this business of changing road names. And that set me thinking... particularly on whether it isn't time we took a look at the entire city and thought about rationalising its road names.

In the past, road names took the names of the areas to which they led or traversed: — Mount Road, Poonamallee High Road, Purasawalkam High Road etc. And, making sense as they do, they warrant no change.Most other road names took their cue from major buildings or the owners of homes to which they led: Cathedral Road, Moubray's Road, Commander-in-Chief Road, Landon's Road etc. While names leading to buildings — like St. George's Cathedral — made sense, remembering East India Company men of not very great significance, merely because they lived in a particular garden house, made no great sense. And changes to them are something no one would really mind, except for the fact that generations have got used to these names — and, with old habits dying hard, the concern over the inconvenience changes will lead to is a point well taken.

What is sad about road-and area-naming is that, even in the past, many of the deserving were forgotten. For instance, while Parry, Binny and Arbuthnot, the founders of industry and commerce in the city, and Madley, who was responsible for the city's water and sewage lines, are remembered, the founders of the city, Francis Day, Andrew Cogan and Beri Thimmappa, and such Governors as Thomas Munro and Charles Trevelyan, who contributed much to the city, are nowhere remembered in road or area name!

In any road-naming exercise, they and others like them need to be remembered. As for the host of local names that await city space, why change old names the public are comfortable with; instead, with so many new areas opening up and with so many new major roads in them, why not use the names in the queue in these areas?

I know the debate on this question can go round and round, but at the end of the day, some rationalisation of road and area names needs to be done by a Heritage Committee appointed by the Corporation and a new street and location directory brought out instead of continuing the present haphazard practices.

Well met, in and around town

In a strange coincidence, over 24 hours on two consecutive days recently, I met three persons whom I had had last contact with over thirty years ago.

To be truthful, if there had been any contact at that time with Indran Amirthanayagam, the new Public Affairs Officer of the U.S. Consulate General and head of the American Information Centre in South India, it would have been the most fleeting of ones. But the parents of this American of Sri Lankan origin I certainly knew. And when they in the mid-Sixties bought a house with whose owners I spent much time every day, I must have at least been introduced to young Indran when they'd come to see the house.Indran's mother is the sister of the wife of a former colleague of mine and his father Guy was a Ceylon Civilian, then Deputy High Commissioner in London before going on to the East West Center, Hawaii. Guy Amirthanayagam's poetry, other writing and his interest in Literature had us occasionally meeting, particularly when he had contributions to offer the publications I worked with. I look forward to his visiting Madras one of these days and talking to the Madras Book Club on Sri Lankan writing in English, something he has kept in close touch with despite making Washington his home now.

Both his sons are in the American Foreign Service, at present on rather similar assignments, Indran in Madras and his brother in Addis Ababa. Indran has inherited his father's talent for poetry and has had collections of poetry published in Spanish, in which he is fluent, and, of course, English. Just out in Colombo is a poignant collection called Ceylon R.I.P. But more than poetry it was in cricket that we found common meeting ground. He joined Haverford College, Pennsylvania, "because it played cricket." In fact, Haverford is the only American college that treats cricket as a major sport, something it has done from 1834. Its beautiful elm-encircled Henry Cope Field dates to 1877 and its John Lester Pavilion, seemingly transported from the English country scene of another age, to 1973. Indran capped his cricketing career captaining Haverford, but has not been too much in touch with cricket since. I hope, however, to see him at the Gopalan Trophy encounter a few days hence, watching Colombo and Madras successfully revive an old series if the monsoon does not play spoilsport.

The next day it was P. Krishnaswamy, a senior journalist in Madurai, who came to see me about a biography he is working on and another focussing on the migration of his grandfather to Ceylon. When we last met he was the Chief Reporter of the Ceylon Daily Mirror and, with his editor, making a success of the first English tabloid in Ceylon after a few of us journalists from its broadsheet elder had made a hash of things by not realising that a successful tabloid needed more then merely getting the size right. Krishnaswamy, who had started his career as a mofussil correspondent of the elder, The Times of Ceylon, in a town in the central highlands where the tea grew, was more successful in making the transition.

Later that day, I caught up with Rob Laurie, the retiring Australian High Commissioner in India, who was saying farewell to Madras. We had last met when he was beginning his career as a Third Secretary in Colombo and turned out for the Diplomats against the Journalists in the annual cricket bash. That was the year burly Iyengar of Madras, now sadly no more, blasted the journalists over the ropes repeatedly and, for the first time, enabled the Diplomats to win. Cricket-loving Laurie, who felt he'd been India's rabbit foot in Calcutta and Madras a few months ago, considers his best slice of luck in India the opportunity he's now got of telling his grandchildren that "I faced Lillee... and I shaped to play him quite well too.'' But will he then add the rest of the story: "He bowled me a lollipop and there was first slip dancing a jig with the ball in his hands"?

More business-like memories of Madras have been of watching Australian firms forge links with the city. There's been Cookie Man spreading the franchise way from Spencer Plaza with its unique ovens that ensure baked-on-the-spot goodies. And there's been AMP, a financial services conglomerate, tying up with the Sanmar Group to enter the Insurance sector in India. There'll be many more partnerships like these in the future, Laurie was sure, but he was equally certain that without him being present India would lose the next series to Australia even here.

In the ads again

It was good to recently see that old Spencer's script signing off an ad again after quite a while. It might not have been the script the firm favoured in an even earlier age, when it was the largest retailing conglomerate in Asia, but it was good to see it linked once again with something the firm was once renowned for: Furniture.

In its heyday, Spencer's was much more than department stores, railway caterers and hoteliers with establishments from Peshawar to Trivandrum, Karachi to Guwahati. It was famous for its aerated drinks, particularly its soda, cream soda and ginger beer.

No sports event was complete unless the crowd almost to a man sucked ice-fruit (ice-palam). It made the famed `Trichinopoly' cigars in Trichy and Dindigul and proudly boasted of Winston Churchill's standing order for his favourite cheroot that remained on its books long after his death! Its seamstresses and milliners as well as the team that tailored the furnishings were ever in demand. And Spencer's furniture was a byword for solidity, elegance and workmanship. Many an old India hand's home in England still boasts Spencer furniture, many a boardroom in India is still enriched with Spencer's gleaming tables and chairs.

But bit by bit all that manufacture has vanished - and so has the name as a brand.

New thinking felt that Spencer's as a brand might be a disadvantage - conjuring up visions of colonialism and burra sahib prices - so the chains that have sprung from it, FoodWorld, Health and Glow, MusicWorld and, now, Giantstores, have all kept far from the name Charles Durrant's "wine and general merchants", founded in 1863, took when John W. Spencer joined it the next year and which Eugene Oakshott made internationally famous when he bought the store in 1882 and, name unchanged, moved it in 1895 into the long, Gothic cathedral-like Indo-Saracenic landmark he built on Mount Road and which survived till fire gutted it in 1983. On its ashes rose Spencer Plaza, now claiming to be the biggest shopping mall in the country - but without the Spencer's soul, not even in the superstore that struggles to keep the Spencer's name alive (outside of the corporate office) and which now, once again, is talking of furniture.

S. MUTHIAH

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