[For those who skipped Part I through III: It's better that way. With such a title, I have digressed far away in Part I, and far away from Part I in Parts II & III - in the opposite direction. As I am more or less back to where I began, I will try again to stick close to the title. Proceed.]

I shouldn't have spoken about those auto-rickshaws and their drivers either. I dislike them. I don't want to have any bad memories about them turning worse by sharing the bad ones with you all in the first place.

What I planned to write about happened long before the cycle-rickshaws and longer before the auto-rickshaws. A time when the dust that sticks to the sole of your chappal while you walk today along South Devi Street was still gravel beside the road. Along with the green-veined crystalline pebble, soon to be claimed by the boy-me.

A time much before my father learnt his first big BASIC program from me (ascending/descending sort) and soon after started making piles of money. Out of shame, I became a Mechanical Engineer and in the process spent most of those piles of money.

It was a time when A.R. Rahman was a kid listening to Ilayaraja, who was in turn listening to the LPs of J.S. Bach and Mozart. MSV was wondering what went wrong. I for my turn was singing varaveena mrithupani, the traditional South Indian Classical introductory song. Sitting amidst a group of fledgling (only in their voices) singers in the rickety, leafy, first floor (roof garden!) of the house opposite to ours in Tatham Street. Later I became a guitarist, mostly to forget my singing, including my singing partners.

By the way, the 'opposite house' belonged to a Professor of Physics - at least that is the title he went by. My father learnt most of his mechanical engineering from him, along with a good amount of mathematics and politics. Seeing my father's plight, I opted safely for physics teaching from him (O' to those dreaded problems in Irodov and those IIT aspirant days). Some years later, I left him thoroughly humbled in physics, with a good working knowledge on horticulture and clay molding.

If you still are not sure of how long before it was, it was the time when the Raja Gopuram (King's Tower) of Srirangam Temple at the South Gate stood just as a simple, squat rock structure, without those present-day thirteen stories. Ilayaraja was still making that money for donating to build a floor on this thirteen-story structure.

I shall present my research paper "Life and Troubled Times after the Gopuram" as a separate essay. For now, I present merely the (only) major conclusion from the study.

That this Vaishanvite Ziggurat was completed in 1987, marking the Beginning of the End of Srirangam Civilization.

Everybody in Srirangam knew it then.

"Everybody" is equal to the "population as per the 1985 census of Srirangam Municipality." It is yet to be renewed. For the benefit of a doubt, I agree, now the LHS is probably "Everybody in 1985 minus one," as I am in Dallas.

To be continued...