Madras Miscellany

Who worries about eco-threats?

I HAVE BEEN reading about how the first phase of the new Ennore satellite harbour will be completed by the year-end and thrown open for shipping in the New Year. I have also been reading about how this will pose a major eco-threat to the Ennore-Pulicat biosphere.

That biosphere includes the Pulicat Lake and backwaters, Kattupalli island with its giant sand dunes and rich fauna and flora, and scenic Koraikuppam and Karungali islands. The bio- diversity threatened here will also affect the livelihood of hundreds of fisherfolk who have been sustained by the wealth, that both, the brackish water as well as the offshore fishing provide.

Threatening this bio-diversity and the traditional occupants of the islands as well as the shores of the backwaters and the lake are not only the port being built but its liquerfied natural gas terminal, a petro-product park that will follow and the power- generation facilities already in place and to be expanded.

An area that should be exploited for eco-tourism - it is possibly the best place for it in India - and heritage tourism is threatened by this march of progress to which many have woken up late.

What intrigues me is how the Government could have got down to raising the thermal power plant, started work on the harbour and drawn up plans for the petro-product park without an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) and with not a whisper of protest from the Greens.

With the work well underway now, there comes a report from a former High Court Judge drawing attention to this threat to the Pulicat-Ennore ecosystem and urging that work be curtailed. With so much work done, nothing is likely to stop the forces of progress. And that is par for the course in such cases in Madras.

Plans are drawn up by the Government for development work, EIAs are perfunctorily done, many moons later, when everyone has forgotten the plans, work starts on them and then, when the work is well underway, the environmentalists wake up to the threat.

Even if they go to court, those posing the threat play a stalling game while work continues apace and at the end of it all there's little likelihood of anyone ordering the eco-threat to be destroyed, for too many millions have been invested in it and no one wants to see that kind of money go down the drain.

A policeman's Kural

TWO WITH whom I shared many a common interest passed away recently. And I will miss the exchanges we had whenever we met. Both made signal contributions to the world of the written word, but sadly did not get the recognition they deserved for the work they did in their respective fields.

Tall, strongly-built, S. M. Diaz was an academic who became a policeman but who as a policeman returned to the world of academia. When the National Police Academy shifted from Mt. Abu to Hyderabad, he was its head and was responsible for laying afresh the institution's foundations in its new home. It was here that he retired and it was to the Academy that he came to spend some of his last hours, speaking at its Silver Jubilee celebrations.

Apart from the Academy, another educational institution he devoted time to was the University of Madras. Students in its Department of Criminology benefitted much from his lectures. An Honorary Professor in the Department, he went on to earn his Ph.D. here after his retirement.

Less known was Diaz, the man of letters. Particularly of Tamil letters. What will be his lasting contribution is his last, major two-volume translation in English of Tiruvalluvar's 'Tirukkural'. I am told by those who have read it that it is a significant effort drawing as it does from the world's great religious books and philosophers to enhance the notes he has appended to the translation. It was during his policing career that he began reading the 'Kural'. The influence it had on him led to his beginning work on its translation. But impatient to share with others what he had found in the 'Kural', he did a minor translation that was published as 'Aphorisms in Tirukkural'. It was the reception this received that made him keep going in retirement till he finished work on the major effort and saw it through the Press. The two-volume translation, available from Varthaman Pathipagam, Madras-17 (Tel: 8257995), will forever remain a memorial to its author, a policeman who was different.

The words she left behind

THE SECOND person who passed away was Shakuntala Jagannathan, whose commitment to promoting India as a tourist destination was something extraordinary. Her two books on 'Hinduism' and 'Ganesha', on which she worked with daughter Nanditha Krishna, she always thought were her most significant contributions. For long Director of the Government of India Tourism Office in Mumbai, she felt these two books contributed greatly to visitors understanding India better, apart from answering some of their most asked questions.

I, however, thought her most useful book was 'India - Plan Your Own Holiday'. However years of experience in the tourism industry were distilled into a planner that every holiday traveller, domestic or from abroad, would find useful. For here were destinations linked together in the best routes to follow if you had just a few days, a week or a fortnight in a particular State or in two or three neighbouring States.

Unfortunately, it never got the promotion in India or abroad a book of its type deserved. But then Indian Tourism has never really promoted itself, has it?

But of all her writing, Shankuntala's own favourite was her last book, 'Sir C. P. Remembered'. They are the reminiscences of a granddaughter, Sir C.P.'s eldest.

The book is, as she admits in her preface, "a book in praise of Thatha". But emphasising as it does the human angle and Sir C.P.'s relationship with his family, it gives the reader an idea of the lifestyle in the 19th and early 20th Centuries of a certain stratum of people and provides a glimpse of some of the social norms of the time.

More importantly, Shakuntala saw this "small tribute to a grandfather from her granddaughter" in these words: "With all its inadequacies, this book is but an offering to one who, by his own life and precepts,

taught us in the family that truth, however unpalatable, courage, whatever the odds, loyalty, even to lost causes, and, commitment to work, should be the guiding beacons of our lives." All this is likely to be revealed in greater detail in a biography of Sir C.P. due later this year.

Sadly, Shakuntala, who had been working closely with the author on it, will not be there to see it in print.

S. MUTHIAH

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