It was great fun doing this walk. There were 45 people and we began in pitch darkness at the Gandhi statue at 6.00 am and began walking at a brisk pace. The walk also gathered a few people as we went along. Tea was given courtesy Mylapore Times. As I mentioned during the walk, I owe much of the basic information on the people who lived on this road to the late Raghu Tagat who in 2000 wrote a 4-part article on the subject for Madras Musings. Tagat was a personal friend though 40 years and more separated us by way of age. He was a treasure-house of information. I also thank Girish Seshagiri, Ejji, Janaki Krishnan, Dr Ram Rajagopal, Suresh Subrahmanyan, Sumitra and R Ratnam, Karthik Bhatt and Randor Guy.

The following were the people/institutions we covered. The names of the houses of some people are given in brackets just for the sake of a record. The walk also intentionally left out those who lived in streets off Radhakrishnan Road mainly keeping time limits in mind.

Col Capper/Miss de la Haye (Capper House/Queen Mary’s College)
The DGP Building (formerly the Freemasons Lodge)
Sir S Subramania Iyer (Beach House)
Sankara Iyer (Sankara Iyer’s bungalow)
The Buckingham Canal
Krishnampet
Timber godown
Dewan Bahadur N Subrahmanyam (CSI Kalyani)
ML Vasanthakumari (Vidyasankar)
Lalitha, Padmini, Ragini and their cousins
TR Venkatarama Sastry, TV Rajagopalan & Rukmini Rajagopalan (Srivatsa)
TV Ramamurthy (Kaustubha) which later became EV Saroja and TR Ramanna’s house (Yogalakshmi)
AK Ramachandra Iyer (Srinivasa)
Dr EV Srinivasan and Dr EV Kalyani (Dwaraka)
Nallamuthu Ramamurthy
SS Vasan (Sudarsan and Gemini House)
M Sudarsanam Iyengar (Manonidhi)
KS Rajagopala Iyengar/ KR Ramamani (Windsor)
Dr S Radhakrishnan (Girija)
Dr N Varadarajan (Sudha)
AV Meiyyappa Chettiar (AVM Avenue)
Sir Vepa Ramesam (Gopal Vihar)
Pt Natesa Sastry (Saraswathi) – This info was provided on the walk by his great grandson Chandrachoodan
Sister RS Subbulakshmi
Ellen Sharma
CS Aiyar + S Chandrashekhar + Vidya Sankar + Dr V Shanta (Chandra Vilas)
A Madhaviah + M Krishnan (Perunkulam House)
Justice PN Ramaswami and Rajam (Vinnagar)
AL AR Chokkiah Chettiar (Devakottai House)
NV Raghavan (now Nilgiris)
Tramways
Benjamin Sullivan + St Ebbas (Sullivan Gardens)
Sir PS Sivaswami Iyer + S Anantharamakrishnan (Sudharma)
Dr P Krishnan (Nandana)
Satyanarayana Brothers (Mandara) _ I got to know that dancer Kalanidhi Narayan had also lived here
MM Murugappa Chettiar (Laurels) this became New Woodlands under K Krishna Rao
Raja of Sivaganga – C Rajam (India House)-SS Vasan (Gemini House)
Dr KR Doraiswami (Roentgen Clinic)
Chakravarthy Iyengar
Aravamudan Iyengar
Justice Pappu Satyanarayana
Justice KS Krishnaswami Iyengar (Mithila)

It came to over 60 different individuals and characters. I had great fun putting it together.

The Business Standard covered the walk today (29th Jan 2011) – http://wap.business-standard.com/storypage.php?id=0&autono=423309