n sankaralinga iyer was an indigenous banker who started the indocommercial bank in 1934 but the moment he realised the area was rich in limestone essential for manufacturing cement he travelled around the district in a bullock cart identifying quarries and buying up land in the 1940s he was interested in different things always learning something new he saw an opportunity in a completely unrelated field and seized it today companies from as far as rajasthan have set up quarries around tirunelveli he says its this entrepreneurial inquiring spirit that made people from this area successful says easun group chairman hari eswaran whose father k eswaran iyer started trading in bicycles and went on to set up easun engineering now a rs 1000crore group with concerns across the world sitting beneath large framed photographs of his maternal grandparents in his family home hari eswaran says that when his father left kallidaikurichi he didnt know the first thing about cycles but in a few years he was thinking of branding and selling them they all had good informal education were hardworking and passionate about what they did and had the capacity to assimilate and learn as they went along kameshwaran says the women were equally industrious and enterprising they converted extra milk into ghee or butter curd into buttermilk made appalams an industry that still exists in the town at one point in the 1980s kallidaikurichi was worldfamous for its fine tasty appalams keeping busy and making money was looked upon favourably and it didnt matter whether the women were from rich or poor families he says small businesses clustered in the area slowly grew into industries and as demand for their goods and services grew the families moved out to tirunelveli to coimbatore across the border to kerala further north to chennai out into europe and then to the rest of the world but at the end of the day this is my village says eswaran whose group has holdings in canada i may not live in kallidaikurichi any more but this is where it all started narrow town houses with tiles on the roof whitewashed walls and slim rods in the windows line the streets of the agraharam the 18 streets where the towns brahmins traditionally lived the architecture and layout of all the houses is similar concrete and wood cool and dark simple and functional once in through the front door the house seems to stretch in an endless line one narrow room leading into the other many houses are even narrower now because brothers dividing up the property put a wall through the house so an 18ft wide room becomes just 8 ft says a professor who lives opposite sundaram iyers house on sri varahapuram street every house has a covered thinnai or verandah which leads into the living room then the family room on to the kitchen an open or sometimes covered courtyard and then out into the backyard