The political temperature in the Tamil Nadu capital being rather high at the moment, one may be well advised to use the television remote somewhat more strategically like even watching Bangladesh bat or a movie, preferably English as a Tamil tearjerker might switch your thoughts back to this great Game of Tamil Throne being fought by two Tamils. Waiting for the denouement in this imbroglio might test the nerves too, which is why it would be best to look at alternative entertainment as virtual therapy for nerves frayed by the brouhaha of very public power play for the coveted seat at Fort St George.
It is not often that Tamil Nadu strays into the national consciousness unless something happened to Amma as in the DA case a couple of year ago when the proceedings in Bengaluru made for similar 24-hour coverage. Not even the Cauvery water issue drew this kind of attention nationally. But then such matters are mundane compared to the personality politics of India which makes for riveting drama each time. Among other things, besides a monopoly on power, politicians also tend to get an excessive hold on media coverage, particularly of the electronic variety.
The Chennai and Tamil Nadu jinx we were speaking of last week has had another dimension added to it in this long drawn political drama. The news room buzz was all about the number of events of recent times that made Chennai seem to be afflicted by a new kind of curse — a runaway suburban train, a grotesque railway platform murder, a hospital drama that may even have challenged the imagination of Arthur Hailey, a mystery death that shook an idolatrous state, the Vardah Cyclone that blew right through the city, the most severe drought seen in years in the wake of double monsoon failure, the oil spill and now the AIADMK split.
Given the compulsions of keeping the drama going online 24 hours a day, the advent of Rajinikanth into politics was recreated as a sub plot. This story is about 21 years old and yet can be churned up at the touch of a button or a dig into archives. It is a bit like the Cabinet reshuffle story that political correspondents in New Delhi can whip up on a dry day. The chances of a Cabinet expansion or reshuffle are, however, greater than the enigmatic Rajini deciding that he would step into the rough-and-tumble of real politics. The poor guy, for all his success on the silver screen, is not in the same class the career politician and their parties. His pockets are not that deep.
Politics is not Rajini’s cup of tea. Apart from his 1996 statement, he never showed an inclination that the previous generation of actors, including the great thespian Sivaji Ganesan, displayed in wishing to get on to the public bandwagon.
The history of Tamil Nadu is such that it has had two scriptwriters, an actor and two actresses who were the wife and girlfriend of the matinee idol MGR making a total of five people from the make-believe world of films capturing Fort St George.
Naturally enough, the illusion of great administration by these social champions of the screen attracted many more who did not quite succeed that much in capturing the public fancy.
Do we need more people from the world of make-believe to govern us and lead the state further down the path of illusory benefits of freebies to build personality cults? This is where the voice of Kamal Haasan comes like a clarion call. He has taken the Meryl Streep path of speaking up to rouse the public consciousness by making a clear statement against the forces that rail against liberalism. Of course, it is a moot point whether people would take good advice coming from film stars as much as they would accept the illusion that they offer of being able to bring in a social revolution. The state Tamil Nadu is in now is an ample index of how it has failed to modernise and how much it has fallen from glory days when it was a fast developing state and now way behind on all the national indices.
We grew up believing in the received wisdom of ‘Politics makes strange bedfellows’. After experiencing firsthand TN politics for so long, don’t you think flipping the maxim around would be more appropriate — ‘Strange bedfellows make politics." No Tamil soap opera has this depth of a plot with filmdom’s great contribution to politics, with film stars and their retinue occupying centre stage for so many decades. Only history will judge whether these will be lumped together as the lost decades as time had slipped by while Tamil Nadu remains in a time warp, with not even the two-line Metro a true concession to modernity.
