5 minutes reading time
We have a new cabinet in Chennai. TVK is in power. Congress MLAs are ministers too, which is the first time in fifty-nine years, if anyone is keeping score. I'm not.
Vijay said on day one that he wouldn't tolerate corruption. I laughed then. I'm laughing harder now.
We've entered the OJT phase. On-the-job training. But they're not training to manage departments; they're training to manage the camera.
Take Keerthana. She's the new Industries Minister. Some reporter asked her about the nine-year-old girl who was raped and murdered in Coimbatore by two men. Her response was a masterpiece. She smiled. She actually smiled. And then she said, "Talk about administrative things now. Talk about politics after 6 PM. Leader knows best."
Wait, that's not right. A TVK page claimed she was the first woman minister in Tamil Nadu, which is a lie — Rukmini Lakshmipathi was minister in 1946. But they don't read history; they make it up.
I went and found the selfie video Keerthana posted two weeks ago during the campaign. She was standing under a street lamp, crying, talking about how women aren't safe in this state, how the previous government was a form of slavery, how everyone needed to vote for the Whistle.
Now she's in the office. Now she has the flag on her car. The screaming is over. The smiling has begun. If a child dies, you ask about it after office hours.
Then there's Vignesh. Prohibition and Excise. The guy in charge of TASMAC. Before the election, Vijay was shouting that the extra ten rupees charged on every liquor bottle was a thousand-crore scam. He said it went straight to Senthil Balaji and the top bosses. Vignesh stood on stages and sang songs about it.
Now Vignesh is the minister. The ten rupees is still being charged. In some places, it's twenty or forty.
So what's the official explanation? Vignesh told the press it's not a scam. It's a "deposit scheme." They charge the ten rupees so people don't throw bottles in forests where elephants might step on them. If you return the bottle, you get the ten rupees back.
Except no one returns the bottles, the shops refuse to take them, and the money stays in the drawer.
When the reporters asked Vignesh why the extra money is still being collected if it was a scam last month, he didn't blink. "This isn't a cinema," he said. "We can't change things in one day. It's a long process."
He's right. It isn't a cinema. In a cinema, you throw the villain off a bridge and the screen goes black. In real life, you take his job and keep his ledger.
The rest of the cabinet is just as funny.
The environment minister doesn't know the difference between environment and tourism. He stood in front of mics calling himself the "wandering minister" because the Tamil words sound similar to him.
The housing minister built a statue of Vijay and is actively worshipping it.
Bussy Anand, the party general secretary, put out a memo saying party members shouldn't meddle in government administration. Two days later, the HR&CE minister, Ramesh, told party members to go inspect the puliyodharai and pongal at local temples. "Just do it politely," he said. "Don't make a scene."
They don't even coordinate their lies.
But the fans don't care.
I spent an hour looking at the TVK pages online. It's a different planet. They're posting slow-motion reels of Vijay walking out of the Secretariat. They're debating his look. "What a cute CM." "He has a cute little tummy." "Look at how he folds his sleeves."
There are power cuts across the state. There were thirty-nine murders in fifteen days. A girl was murdered in Coimbatore.
And the people who voted for change are arguing about whether a video of Coimbatore IG Ramya Bharathi smiling while discussing the murder was generated by AI. They think the smile was fake news. They think if they prove the video was fake, the murder becomes fake too.
This is what happens when you turn a fandom into a government. You don't get citizens; you get an audience that expects a post-credit scene.
This is the real victory of the TVK social media machine. It didn't just win an election; it altered the basic currency of accountability.
If a minister makes a fool of himself, the official page drops a new slow-motion walk with a high-energy background score. If a tragedy happens, the troll army floods the comments section to accuse the reporters of political bias or AI manipulation. The reality doesn't matter because the aesthetic is bulletproof.
Vijay sits at the top, silent, pristine, and entirely insulated. He doesn't need to answer for the power cuts or the incompetence of his ministers. The fans will do the work of defending the image, translating every failure into OJT or a long-term plan that we ordinary people are too dumb to understand.
We replaced the old, corrupt, dynastic politics not with a new system, but with a better-edited feed. The machinery is still the same. The billing is still the same.
We just have a more handsome face on the billboard.
I don't have a smart way to end this. I'm just tired.
The machine beeps. The screen glows. The likes go up.
Enjoy the show.