Sangeeta Sthalams : A Tiruvarur Diary

It all started when Sanjay (Subrahmanyan) called me one morning to say that he was performing in the float festival at Tiruvarur. Immediately, visions of the huge Kamalalayam and the temple beside it (both of which I had never set my eyes on before) floated up. The town of the Trinity! My drab office appeared to have become roseate in hue and nagaswara music was making itself heard. In a slightly raised voice, so that the nagaswara could not drown it out, I could hear myself telling Sanjay that I would tag along.

So here I am in the train, with Sanjay, S. Varadarajan, K. Arunprakash and K.V. Gopalakrishnan. T.M. Krishna put in a brief appearance before boarding another coach. He and his party are on their way to Kumbakonam by the same train. Sometime later, a Bharatanatyam dancer from Singapore puts in an appearance. He too is on his way to Kumbakonam. Quite an arty train this one. Conversation is mainly on mobile phones and their idiosyncrasies. Sanjay is quite the expert, with young KVG being a big time whiz.

I was very grieved at the sad demise of Professor V. Subramaniam.

I had the good fortune to know Prof. Subramaniam rather intimately for about three decades. I first met him in 1974-75 at Bangalore. He had obtained a grant from ICSSR to conduct a research study on social elites of Bangalore city and for institutional associationship, he chose the Institute for Social and Economic Change, Bangalore, of which I happened to be the Academic Registrar then. For the next three or four years he kept visiting the institute for short periods to complete the project.

Besides providing administrative support for the project, I used to meet him almost daily, outside office hours, since both of us were residing on the campus. Each one of those meetings was an education to me, whether the topic of the talk was administrative practices, social anthropology or cultural sociology. He had already done some original work on those subjects, particularly cultural sociology, which was rather new to me.

The stamp on Meera is one of the four commemorative stamps in the saints and poets series issued by the Department of Posts on 1 October 1952. The stamp is in the denomination of two annas (2A); colour orange red; watermark multistar; perf. 14; and was printed in the India Security Press, Nasik.

There is also a pictorial cancellation on special cover which shows Meera dancing in ecstasy. This was issued on the 8th July 1977 at the Rajasthan Philatelic Exhibition—RATPEX-77, held in Jaipur.