Two ­Heroes, Twin Roles

Kamalahaasan launches his party, Rajnikanth another movie

- G.C. Shekhar

 ACTOR Kamalahaasan would not have imagined that the thrust and parry of politics would nick him within a span of five hours—the time it took him to reach Madurai from Rameswaram, from where he had begun his political journey. At Rameswaram, he was asked why he chose to start at former president A.P.J. Abdul Kalam’s house when he could not find time to even attend his funeral. “I am not in the habit of att­ending funerals,” retorted Kamal, but only for his bluff to be called in the hyp­eractive social media, which showed Kamal was exploiting Kalam’s name for political expediency—he had app­arently met the scientist only once, that too on a flight.

 Within a couple of hours of the actor claiming to abhor funerals, photos of him accompanying Tamil film legend Sivaji Ganesan’s body and attending the funerals of actors Manorama, Nagesh and Gemini Ganesan, as well as of music icon M.S. Subbulakshmi, flooded social media with the question: “So who is this man attending these funerals?”

“Kamal would have learnt that giving an escapist reply would not make him a smart politician—not when the digital footprints of his past are readily available to contradict any claim he makes today,” points out actor Kavithalaya Krishnan, who has shared screen space with him. “This applies to every celebrity who tries to take a deceitful stand.”

At Madurai, Kamal launched his new party on February 21 in the presence of Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal. The juiced-up expectations gave way to an underwhel­ming response from the crowd when he announced the name of his party, Makkal Needhi Maiyam (MNM), roughly meaning People’s Justice Centre, which could be mistaken for a legal aid centre. Similarly, the flag depicting six hands joined together in a circle was alleged to be a copy of a postal union’s flag.