D. Hemchandra Rao was in Koteshwar, Gujarat, just 60 miles from Karachi, visiting a lighthouse there when Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced demonetisation.
“I had ₹1.5 lakh, all in ₹500 notes. I drove down to Diu and the postmaster there gave me ₹3,000 in hundreds with which I travelled to Lothal, Gujarat. The problem was food . I stayed in lighthouses but no hotel wanted ₹500 notes. We drove from Bhavnagar to Chennai non-stop in three days,” recalled the 77-year-old, who has been researching lighthouses for 15 years.
Unique achievement
Soon, he will set forth to Maharashtra to visit the 28 lighthouses there. “Then, I will have visited all the 200 plus lighthouses on the mainland,” says Mr. Rao, who drove along the eastern coast from Ganga Sagar in West Bengal to Pulicat in February 2015. “It is not easy to drive to these places. The bridges are far from the lighthouses,” he explained.
So why the interest in lighthouses? “I am a civil engineer and I started with the arched bridges of Buckingham Canal and lighthouses also came along,” said the researcher whose book, Madras Exchange Lighthouse 1796 , was launched on Wednesday by the Department of Tamil Nadu Archives and Historical Research.
His book explains in meticulous detail the size, shape and the design of each lighthouse, with information about the distance at which a person can see the light from the sea.
D. Venkataraman, director of Lighthouses and Lightships, said the structures are relevant even in the modern age as “When there is only water all around, the sight of light is physical.” The book’s title is a tribute to the Madras Exchange Lighthouse which was atop the Fort museum. The structure, built in 1796, is now non-functional.
