Bursting the Bubble
” Super star yaarunu ketta chinna kozhandaiyum sollum”, go the lines of a hit Tamil song, which mean that even a child knows who Rajni Kanth is. The words super star can well be replaced by Amma and the line would still hold good. If you think ‘Amma’ simply means mom, it only shows that your not from Tamil Nadu. Because even children have their basics of politics right. Amma – Jayalalitha, the current CM and Kalaignar (artiste?!) – Karunanidhi.
One one hand the communist party keeps splitting up and other local parties are mushrooming, but the fight for CM is only between these two giants, so much so that the cushion on the CM’s seat can probably recognise only their bottoms. For those of you who have no clue about this game, let me give the gist. Jayalalitha is the head of AIADMK and Karunanidhi is that of DMK. And this, trust me is all you need to know about TN politics.
Successful stints in the tinsel town pave way for politics. That is how both J and K got into the power game. Both Jayalalitha and Karunanidhi have had and are having their share of corruption charges with the latter embroiled in the worst corruption scams of the century.
DMK was the first party to legitimately drain the treasury with seemingly fair bargains like a Kilo of rice for Re. 1, free TV sets, building useless fly-overs and so on. The AIADMK for its part has been closing down whatever infra the DMK Government built and promising other freebies, with people’s best intentions at heart of course!
Lets now see the nature of the natives. TN people belong to a different race – the Dravidian race. However, they identify themselves with the Aryan Varna system. The castes are divided into sub castes, sub sub castes and are split to the last detail. The politicians have a simple answer to cut across this mind boggling diversity – caste preferences.
The Indian Constitution has made things easy for them by classifying castes as Forward, backward, scheduled castes and tribes. Make a god out of Ambedkar, talk of oppression, suppression, depression and you would become the hero of the masses. This is the mantra followed by the majority of politicians across the country and TN politicians have been dedicated followers of this dharma, increasing the reservation to a whopping 69%. Incidentally, Ambedkar had allowed around 25 years’ of reservation to uplift the downtrodden. And to just remind you, we are in our 64th year of independence.
This probably is the reason for the maximum number of professional colleges in this state, making students the scapegoats. So, if I belong to a forward community, I need to score 99.9% to secure a a seat in the government medical colleges. The engineering scene is quite a relief, requiring me to score just 98% instead. The sheer inability to secure merit seats in my opinion has triggered the mushrooming of private professional colleges in the state.
What does this trend do to the society? Students with68% marks become doctors, ripping patients’ tummies and leaving spare scalpels inside, while the bright ones leave the country, looking for greener pastures. And the society blames them for brain drain and hiccuping economy. And mind you, most of the reserved castes today have rich families.
This has now changed the dynamics of our societal structure. The FCs are the new oppressed class and need a fair chance.
J and K comfortably ignore this situation, continue their publicity stunts by naming localities after their own names, donating wheel chairs for the physically challenged and giving Rs. 1000 to every fishing family for those days when the seas are choppy.
And we the educated elite wait for our free grinders, tutting about the news and most importantly don’t caste our votes, because it is a wasted effort anyway.
Madhrasapattinam 