6 minutes reading time
I spent half an hour this evening annoyed about a single word.
Nanbi (நண்பி).
Vijay and his media circle have been tossing it around constantly.
Some people have said that it's not a proper tamil word. Now, it makes me cringe,but i dont care much. I pointed about this word to an cnt who thinks he is often intellectual.i dont know what he did. maybe asked chatgpt to find proof that nanbi is proper tamil word. he sent me this classical poetry: "நண்பி தென்று தீய சொல்லார்" from the Nanneri. Except that line isn't proof that ancient Tamil had a distinct feminine noun for a female friend. It's just sandhi: nanbu (நண்பு) plus idhu (இது). Sandhi phonology doing its normal grammatical job, not a seventh-century grammatical invention.
At first, it irritated me. But after drinking some room temp tea cuz i forgot to drink when it was hot, and am too lazy to reheat it, I realized I don't actually give a shit about nanbi.
Languages make new words. Tamil doesn't need to mechanically stamp every masculine noun ending in -an into a feminine -i, but if people want to use nanbi as a back-formation from nanban, let them. Nanbar is already sitting right there anyway, perfectly usable and gender-neutral, basically the Tamil equivalent of saying "folks." Tamil has survived centuries of linguistic shifts, absorbing Sanskrit, Portuguese, and Persian without collapsing into dust. One constructed word from a fantasy isn't going to sink the ship.
The word isn't the problem.
The problem is the manufactured, brain-dead pidgin that this entire political movement has normalized.
Walk past a television or scroll through any local feed right now, and you get bombarded with slogans that sound like they were drafted by an eighth-grader trying to write an advertising campaign in the back of a rough notebook.
Sports-a edu. Drugs-a vidu.
He put that on stage like it was an epoch-defining policy vision. A literal government-level slogan, delivered with the cadence of a commercial for cheap soft drinks.
Then his ministers get in front of microphones. "Tamizha promote pannanum."
Why are grown adults with cabinet portfolios speaking like teenagers who get fined five rupees if they speak their mother tongue during lunch break?
Code-switching happens. Everyone does it. You use an English word when you're talking about a technical specification, a database schema, or when the Tamil word is clumsy in casual conversation. That's natural speech.
What we have now isn't natural code-switching. It's a deliberately cultivated, synthetic political register. It's the linguistic equivalent of fast food: heavily processed, devoid of substance, and designed entirely for quick consumption on thirty-second video reels.
What makes it infuriating is the historical contrast.
I didn't agree with the DMK on half their economic policies, but you couldn't accuse their founders of linguistic incompetence. Annadurai spoke brilliant, sharp English when he debated in Parliament or gave lectures abroad, and he spoke immaculate Tamil when addressing a crowd on the beach. Karunanidhi's command of the language was formidable whether you liked his politics or not. Jayalalitha was thoroughly convent-educated, fluent in English, and yet when she stood at a podium to deliver an official address, she spoke formal, precise Tamil without scattering random English fragments into every subordinate clause.
They understood that the two languages have distinct structures, distinct weights, and distinct registers. They kept them separate in their heads because they had the basic discipline to do so.
Now we have OJT for Clowns where the cabinet members function like a fan club echo chamber.
If Vijay tilts his head a certain way on screen, every district secretary mimics the tilt. If Vijay speaks in half-baked, movie-dialogue fragments, his entire party apparatus adopts the same pidgin as their official dialect. There is no independent political rhetoric. There is no rhetorical identity. It's just a cinema fan club that leased a fleet of white SUVs, got their hands on an administrative machinery, and started running press briefings like audio launch speeches.
And then came the defense.
Maria Wilson was on television recently, essentially defending the inability to speak clean Tamil by pulling out the personal background card: saying he was born a Christian, as if growing up in a Christian household somehow exempts a leader from knowing the language of the state he wants to govern.
That is an astonishing level of intellectual dishonesty.
Constantine Joseph Beschi, an Italian Jesuit priest from Castiglione delle Stiviere, came to Tamil Nadu in the eighteenth century. He learned the language so deeply that he composed the Thembavani, wrote the Chaturakarathi dictionary, and became known as Veeramamunivar. He didn't shove Italian or Latin loanwords into his verse as an excuse.
Tamil has had towering literary and political contributors across every single background: Christian, Muslim, Jain, atheist, Hindu. G.U. Pope spent years translating the Tirukkural and Thiruvasagam. Umaru Pulavar gave us the Seerapuranam. The idea that a modern, multi-millionaire movie star and his fan boys born and raised in Tamil Nadu cannot speak a full paragraph of unbroken Tamil because of his religion is insulting to the entire history of the language.
It's not about religious identity. It's about lazy entitlement.
Nobody is asking for archaic Sangam poetry in everyday administration. We don't need politicians speaking in classical venpas at a press conference.
We just want people who don't treat the language of seven crore people like a decorative filter.
Pop cinema spent three decades convincing an entire generation that speaking broken, scrambled sentences makes you look modern and accessible. TVK took that cinematic trope and made it state policy.
The fan pages will keep cheering. They will make slow-motion edits of Vijay saying "Sports-a edu" with a heavy bass drop, flood comment sections to attack anyone who points out the vacuousness of it all, and tell us that we just don't understand the "mass connect." thankfully, the BGM is ravana mavanda. Not Ravana son da.
The fan noise is loud. The heat in this room is miserable. The ceiling fan is rattling against its bearing, making that dull metal clicking sound that gives me a headache every afternoon.
I'm closing the tab.
Image Credit: Canvassing for Votes (Humours of an Election, Plate 2) by William Hogarth via Wikimedia Commons