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Vijay unplugged: A ‘what if’ who emerged as an unscripted force

The Indian Express·Arun Janardhanan·28 days ago
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TVK chief Vijay’s family members celebrate in Chennai, Monday. PTI For years, Joseph Vijay was described as a possibility. A conversation that surfaced before film releases, an afterthought in political speculation, a “what if” that Tamil Nadu had grown used to entertaining and then discarding. On Monday, that conversation ended. What followed is not merely an electoral victory, but the arrival of something the state has not seen in five decades — a new political force that did not emerge from a split, an inheritance or an ideological school, but from a man who stepped in from outside and was carried forward by recognition before organisation. It is tempting, and perhaps inevitable, to reach for M G Ramachandran. The parallels are visible: cinema, charisma, emotional memory, the conversion of screen presence into political capital. But the resemblance holds only up to a point. MGR was shaped inside the Dravidian movement before he broke away from the DMK to float the AIADMK.…

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