5 minutes reading time
I am sitting at VMK Bakes near the Vellalore L&T bypass. It used to be MDS Bakes. I don't know why the name was changed. Not just this one, but many of the MDS branches got rebranded, though some still remain as MDS. Anyway, I digress.
I look at my hands. I am several people today, none of whom is the guy who wrote those posts last year. I am a stranger sitting on a steel chair, listening to the high-pitched idle of a couple of KTMs and MT15s parked outside, wondering why the person I used to be cared so much.
We're all looking at screens. It's the only way to pretend we aren't here.
"Avaru paathu seivaaru da," one of the MT15 guys says, adjusting his bandana. It's fucking hot. Remove the bandana on your head. Anyway, He's talking about Vijay. The leader. The new god of the Secretariat. He says it with this quiet, unthinking certainty that makes my head throb.
Two days ago, a nine-year-old girl in Coimbatore, not far from here, was raped and killed by two men, Karthik and Mohanraj. It's the sort of horror that makes you want to scrub your brain with a wire brush. Some reporters caught Keerthana, our new Minister of Industries, outside her office. She's a woman, i think she has kids, so they asked her.
She smiled. She actually gave them this neat, TV-ready smile and said, "Talk about administrative things now. Political things after 6 PM. Whatever the leader decides will be correct."
I want to grab her by the collar and shake her, but I also want to lay down in the dirt and sleep for a hundred years. That's the double bind of this place. The street-level brutality of the world exists right next to the absolute, floating indifference of the people we put in charge. Keerthana was crying on Instagram under a street light during the campaign, screaming about women's safety and the "slavery" of the old regime. Now she has the flag on her car. The screaming is over. The scheduling has begun.
If a child dies, you ask about it after office hours.
Then there's Vignesh. The Excise Minister. Mannar Vaarisu. Yup. Real mamannar vaarisu, or at least that's what the poster says.
Vijay used to stand on stages and sing about the extra ten rupees on every TASMAC bottle being a thousand-crore loot. Now Vignesh is in office, and the ten rupees is still being collected. In some places it's twenty.
Some guys at the next table are laughing about it. "Who returns the bottle, da? The shop guy will throw you out if you bring it back. The ten rupees stays in the drawer."
Vignesh told the press it's not a scam. It's a "deposit scheme" to keep elephants from stepping on glass in the forests. It's a beautiful, green-washed lie. The elephants are still stepping on glass, but now they're doing it for the environment. And the 10 rupees they collect is on top of the refundable deposit. Vignesh says it's a long process. Of course it is. In a film, you throw the villain off a bridge and the screen goes black. In real life, you take his ledger and keep the change.
I look at my cream bun. The sweetness is sickening.
I am nothing. I'll never be anything. But even a shadow has to watch the light change.
The whole government was built on a forged letter anyway. Or a deepfake. Depending on which liar you want to believe today. TTV Dhinakaran is filing police complaints, claiming TVK fabricated the support letter of AMMK MLA S Kamaraj using AI. TVK released a video of Kamaraj signing it in a very weird location.
But does it matter? The Governor accepted it. The trust vote happened. Twenty-five AIADMK rebels defied their whip and voted for the government. VCK and the Left were screaming that giving these defectors cabinet berths would destroy political morality. Thirumavalavan threatened to pull support. So Vijay gave them a promise instead: no berths. The rebels keep their seats and their corruption cases, and the allies keep their dignity on paper.
Everyone wins, except the fools who thought the vote was about change.
The fan pages are rewriting history anyway. They're posting that TVK appointed Tamil Nadu's first woman minister, ignoring Rukmini Lakshmipathi in 1946. They don't know history. They don't need to. If the reel is edit-locked with a high-tempo background score, the history becomes whatever the editor wants it to be.
The housing minister built a statue of Vijay and is actively offering prayers to it. A plaster god for a plaster government.
I went to a college where we had no elections, no politics, nothing. We had fan clubs instead. We fought over whether Vijay was better than Ajith. Now those same kids are running the troll army, flooding the comments of any journalist who asks a question, calling them DMK agents. They think they are defending the state. They're just defending their own right to be entertained.
I am tired. The fan is clicking above my head, a slow, useless rhythm. The air is hot and smells of grease. We thought we were voting for a new politics. We just voted for a better-edited feed.
The machine beeps. The likes go up.
Enjoy the show.
Image Credit: Ambigram Magic Dream - mirror symmetry with a handheld pattern giving a reversed shadow on a blue wall.jpg via Wikimedia Commons