6 minutes reading time
I was sitting in my room in Coimbatore late at night, bored out of my skull, playing around with a GPS spoofing app on my phone.
Just goofy, low-stakes entertainment. I set my location to somewhere up north (Gurgaon, Rohtak, or wherever) just to see who popped up on Hinge and what kind of lives people were living up there.
I matched with a lady from Haryana. A vadakki, as we say down here. Not a friend, not a date, just a random profile on a screen.
Now, instead of doing normal human small talk or attempting to hook up like a functional adult, my broken brain somehow steered the conversation into politics.
I brought up the whole circus playing out in Tamil Nadu right now: the absurd spectacle I wrote about earlier today in The Thin-Skinned Monarch, where Udhayanidhi Stalin got dragged off to Thanjavur by the police after making a double entendre at a Cauvery rally while crowd members yelled Trisha's name.
She texted back: "Who is Udhayanidhi?"
I stopped typing for a second.
"The guy who just got arrested," I replied. "We've been talking about it all day."
"Oh," she typed. "I thought that was Stalin Junior."
I tried to explain how Tamil naming works. "His name is Udhayanidhi. We don't really have inherited family surnames like you do up north. Stalin is his patronym, his father's given name. You call him Udhayanidhi."
She seemed genuinely baffled by this. Then she dropped a sentence that made me drop my phone on the bed:
"Oh. That name sounds like he's from a good family. Like Vijay Thalapathy."
I corrected her. "Thalapathy isn't his name. It's a movie title. His actual name is Joseph Vijay."
Silence on the chat for a few seconds. Then:
"Wait, he's Christian? I thought Thalapathy was a Brahmin surname. You know, like Tripathy, Trivedi, Dwivedi, Chaturvedi."
I told her Vijay is Christian, Udhayanidhi is not, and neither of those names carry the caste baggage she was projecting onto them. She replied that every national news channel she watches calls him "Thalapathy Vijay" and calls Udhayanidhi "Junior Stalin."
I sat there looking at the blue light of the phone screen, thinking about how strange this was.
At first, your mind wants to lean into paranoia. You start wondering if there's some calculated media strategy in Delhi, some deliberate trick by northern news outlets or TVK's PR team to sanitize Vijay as a respectably caste-coded figure for national audiences, while turning Udhayanidhi into a dynastic appendage.
It’s weird, isn't it? Have you ever noticed how national anchors casually drop given names? They almost never say Udhayanidhi or Joseph. They strip away the actual names people were given at birth and replace them exclusively with titles and patronyms. Stalin. Junior. Thalapathy.
They erase the Tamil identity of the name and repackage it into something that fits a Hindi news desk's mental grid.
In Tamil Nadu, the anti-caste movement decades ago stripped away inherited family surnames. People shed caste tags like Iyer, Mudaliar, Pillai, or Naicker from their official names, choosing to use given names and patronymic initials instead. It was a conscious social choice to unhook personal identity from hereditary caste status.
Up north, the system works in reverse. Surnames are explicit caste billboards: Trivedi, Sharma, Yadav, Gupta, Tripathy. So when a Delhi news anchor or a viewer in Haryana looks at a Tamil politician, their brain frantically scans the name for a recognizable caste handle.
When they hear the sound -pathy at the end of a film title, their brain instantly maps it to Tripathy. A simple, lazy phonetic reflex born out of complete unfamiliarity with anything south of the Vindhyas. To a mind raised entirely within the Hindi belt's caste lexicon, Thalapathy sounds like a priest who knows three Vedas, and Udhayanidhi sounds like an unclassifiable anomaly.
It’s not a masterstroke of psychological manipulation. It’s just pure, unvarnished cultural ignorance.
Look, I get it: one Hinge match and her family is an absurdly small sample size. I’m not stupid enough to pretend a midnight chat with one person from Haryana speaks for half a billion people. But when that tiny sample lines up line-for-line with how every major national network frames these names, the sample isn't an anomaly anymore; it's just a mirror showing what a lazy media diet produces.
And this is where the comedy stops and the grim joke begins.
These are the exact same political forces (the RSS, the centralizers in Delhi, the "One Nation" zealots) who insist day in and day out that India is not a "Union of States," but a single, ancient, indivisible "Nation."
They want One Nation, One Election. They want One Nation, One Language. They want a uniform cultural identity driven from a desk in New Delhi.
Yet the average citizen in their heartland (and the media networks that feed them) knows so little and cares so little about the two hundred and fifty million people living in the South that they cannot even distinguish between an actor's cinema title and a Brahmin surname. They don't know how our names work. They don't know why we stripped caste tags from our names. They don't care to know.
We are expected to subsume our languages, our fiscal revenues, and our political representation into their grand project of national integration. As I've argued before when breaking down the numbers in Taxation Without Representation and The Federal Imperative, we subsidize their state budgets while they prepare to strip us of our parliamentary seats in the upcoming delimitation.
They want the territory. They want the tax revenue. They want the illusion of a grand monolithic empire stretching from Kashmir to Kanyakumari.
But they don't even know who we are.
Article 1 of the Constitution didn't use the word "Union" by accident. Dr. Ambedkar and the drafting committee called it a Union of States because India was never a single, pre-existing cultural monolith. It was a voluntary federated agreement between wildly different linguistic and historical regions. A contract.
When one half of that contract doesn't even know the basic naming logic of the other half, but insists on dictating its governance, its elections, and its national identity, it isn't a "Nation."
It's just an empire of indifferent landlords who haven't bothered to learn the names of the people living on the estate.