The scenic byway offers a lot more than just the way to Santa Fe.
April 15, 2021
This article is part of On the Road Again: A Texan s guide to road trips in Arkansas, Colorado, Louisiana, New Mexico, and Oklahoma.
Before my first trip to New Mexico, for a writing conference when I was 24, I mistakenly imagined the Southwest to be one large desert. After flying from Houston to Albuquerque and embarking on the two-hour-plus drive to Taos, I couldn’t really comprehend the scene unfolding before me as I left one pueblo and entered another, the spaces between gloriously free of Targets and PetSmarts and Best Buys. The pink mountains rolled into silvery ones covered in pine trees, with mesas and gorges scattered between. I stayed outside Taos in the village of Arroyo Seco, where I spent too much money on a silver ring that held a piece of turquoise in its prongs and not very securely, as I’d find out.
While Pappammal has won the award for agriculture, Subramanian won the award for trade and industry.
Subramanian founded the trust Shanthi Social Services. Through the trust, he provides multiple high-quality services including medicines, petrol, scans, dialysis treatment, cremation, ambulance services and food at subsidized costs. This made lakhs of people who could not afford basic needs like food, healthcare and education access the above through the trust. The trust does not accept any donation.
However, the government has decided to honour him for his work in establishing Shanthi Gears from scratch and turned the company into a third largest player in gear industry. Known as the ‘Gear Man’ of Coimbatore, Subramanian completed his diploma in PSG Polytechnic in the 1960s and taught for a few years in the college, before establishing Shanthi Engineering and Trading Co in 1969. The company was manufacturing small gears. In 1972, he converted it into a private company called