R.K. Shanmukham Chetty: Presented the first budget of independent India on November 26, 1947

Tis story begins with a man who was king, knight, and merchant prince rolled into one. Raja Sir Annamalai Chettiar (1881-1948) was a banker, industrialist, educationist (he founded Annamalai University) and patron of the arts. Legend has it that he once owned 85,000 acres of land in Burma. That's in the realm of the possible: the man belonged to the Nagarathar sub-sect of the Chettiar community and most Nagarathars of his age were free spirits who roamed parts of South Asia accumulating untold wealth. India was ruled by the British in those days, but Nagarathars were into secular, not political pursuits; the British found them smart and trustworthy; so, aided by the British the Nagarathars found it easy to scour other British colonies in the region for trading opportunities. History has it that the Nagarathars-the name means townsfolk in Tamil and implies that this sub-sect of Chettiars wasn't exactly into farming-came from the coastal village of Kaveripoompattinam, which submerged, Atlantis-like into the Bay of Bengal. The community moved to the hinterland, from the Chola kingdom to the Pandya kingdom, before finally settling down in the arid region of Karaikudi, in some 75 villages now known as Chettinad. India's current Finance Minister, P. Chidambaram, is a Nagarathar. Better still, he is a descendant of Annamalai Chettiar.

Nagarathars (and other Chettiars) were, and are, punctilious about their books, and are famed for their ability to crunch big numbers in their heads almost in real-time. "Decades of quick calculations must have got imprinted on our genes," laughs Dr Nalli Kuppuswami Chetty who runs the eponymous chain of sari shops (he is a Padmasaliyar Chettiar, a sub-sect that originated in the Vijayanagar empire in the thirteenth century, and later moved south). Chetty recalls that he always maxed his math papers at school; to score anything less would have dishonoured his heritage. Historian S. Muthiah says that until the 1950s, most Chettiar children were taught fractional tables (up to 1/192). Arun Murugappan, the 37-year-old marketing head of Prodorite Corrosives and a scion of the Murugappa group says the generation before him had to learn "quarter-time tables."

After the break up of the colonies, Nagarathars returned home. Some, like Murugappa Chettiar the founder of the Murugappa Group, entered business. Others tried other things-one, for instance, tried his hands at movie making (A.V. Meiyappa Chettiar, the founder of AVM Studios). Given the Chettiar talent for math and emphasis on due diligence, it wasn't surprising that one of the community, R.K. Shanmukham Chetty, a Vanniba Chettiar, attended the International Monetary Conference at Bretton Woods in the US in 1944 (both the IMF and the World Bank were born there). Chetty presented the first budget of independent India on November 26, 1947. And on July 8, a Nagarathar proved the community still hasn't lost the touch.