6 minutes reading time
I am thinking about Homelander.
No, wait, that's too simple. Homelander is a cartoon. But the god-complex, the complete decoupling of the symbol from the actual, boring work of running a society: that's real.
I have this comparison draft sitting on my drive. Some guy sent me a structured analysis comparing Narendra Modi's union government and Joseph Vijay's state administration in Tamil Nadu. All academic and neat. Words like "charismatic populism" and "media-evasive communication." It's too clean. The reality is much dirtier. It's just two guys running the same basic operating system, but one has a beard and the other has a better dance step.
It's the same blueprint. Different packaging.
Let's start with the press conferences. Or the lack of them.
Modi hasn't held a single unscripted, solo press conference in India since he took office in 2014. Not one. When he went to the White House in 2023, Biden's press corps cornered him into answering one question about minority rights. He mumbled something about democracy being "in our DNA" and went back to his scripted broadcast. His team defends this by saying people prefer direct contact. Sure. They prefer one-way transmission because the alternative requires answering for why the railway infrastructure is collapsing.
Vijay does the exact same thing. During the entire 2026 campaign, the man was a ghost to journalists. No press meets. No unscripted interviews. He sat in his caravan, drove around, and then stood on a stage to deliver fifteen-minute speeches full of movie punchlines. He told the crowd he left a hundred-crore cinema career to serve them, and everyone cheered.
Why risk the press? If a journalist asks you how you plan to manage a state's deficit when you don't even know the difference between the revenue and capital accounts, the illusion cracks. It's easier to stay in the caravan.
Then there's the candidate list.
Max Weber wrote about charismatic authority. A fancy academic way of saying people will follow a leader because they think he has some magical qualities. In our case, the magic is either the "Modi wave" or twenty years of screen nostalgia.
In the national elections, people voted "for Modi." They didn't know their local BJP candidate's name. They didn't care. The candidate was just a plastic signpost. TVK's debut in May was the same farce. Vijay contested from two seats: Perambur and Trichy East. He won both, obviously, then resigned Trichy East because you can't sit on two chairs at once. But what about the other 106 MLAs?
The TVK online army was screaming during the campaign that their candidates were all PhD holders, scientists, and elite intellectuals. Affidavits are public, you know. You can just look them up. About thirty-five percent of the elected TVK legislators have an education of High School (HSC) or below. They are complete novices. They have no public track record, no base, nothing. If Vijay wasn't on the poster, they wouldn't win a resident welfare association election.
So how do you run a cabinet with people who don't know how a government order is drafted? You don't. You put a few loyal managers like Bussy Anand and Aadhav Arjuna in the cabinet, and you centralize everything else in the Chief Minister's Office. Just like Modi's PMO. The MLAs are just placeholders. They exist to raise their hands when the whip tells them to.
And the digital noise is incredible.
The BJP's IT cell is a professional, salaried engine. TVK has its fan clubs. They don't need to pay their trolls; the fans do it for the love of the star. But the behavior is identical. Anyone who questions the leader is a DMK agent, a paid journalist, a traitor.
Lately, they've been doing this thing I call "policy laundering."
TVK has been in power since May 10, 2026. They haven't passed a single significant administrative directive or budget. But if you look at the fan pages, they are claiming credit for everything. They posted that Vijay ordered chairs to be placed in Revenue Department offices so citizens don't have to stand. That was a DMK Government Order from May 15, 2025. They claimed Vijay started free coaching for competitive exams. That's the Naan Mudhalvan scheme from 2022. They even claimed the ban on government bus drivers using mobile phones was a new Vijay directive. That was from 2022.
The commercial TV channels just rebroadcast this crap without checking. The Hindu had to put out a video explaining that these are old schemes. But the fans don't watch The Hindu. They watch the reels.
When a crisis hits, the shield goes up.
If the union government fails during a pandemic or an infrastructure collapse, the BJP media machine decentralizes the blame. It's the state's fault. It's the bureaucracy. The Prime Minister is still pure, working eighteen hours a day.
When TVK had its first real disaster, they used the exact same shield.
On September 27 last year, during the campaign in Karur, the TVK rally ended in a stampede. Mismanagement, no water, absolute chaos. Forty-one people died. Seven kids, seventeen women, nine men. They died in the dirt because a movie star wanted a big crowd.
The TVK's immediate response wasn't to admit their organizers fucked up. They suspended activities for a month, and the online trolls started attacking the local police, claiming it was a DMK conspiracy. Vijay put out a tweet blaming the police for not telling him the crowd size, announced twenty lakhs compensation, and let his General Secretary Jothiraman deal with the court cases. The Supreme Court eventually ordered a CBI probe.
The leader remains untouched. The dead are buried, the compensation is paid, and the brand is protected.
I don't know why I keep writing this. I'm paying off a loan, sitting in a room in Coimbatore, watching the streetlights flicker. The voltage is low again. The UPS is making that stupid clicking sound. Fuck. This UPS. I dont know why I bought it. I am having buyers remorse with it, but the powercut has increased over last two months, so hopefully it's worth it. but wait. TVK people would say that this is the solution - UPS, solar or just shut the fuck up and tolerate.
We wanted to get rid of the old families, the DMK and AIADMK. We thought we were voting for something different. Different indeed!
Worse poison. Better filter.
Enjoy the show.
Image Credit: Mannequin exécutant les ordres transmis par téléphone (Pacific) - btv1b53196255d.jpg via Wikimedia Commons