Usually, it would take me five minutes to cross that stretch. Ten minutes even if I walked. That day, even after three hours, I had barely moved.
There was a massive crowd, all trying to catch a glimpse of an actor on a campaign trail. There were five-year-old kids dancing at traffic signals. And no, they were not poor children dancing for alms on the streets.
All this happened even after people had already lost their lives in a stampede just trying to see him.
****
Years ago, when Joseph Vijay made his political aspirations public, I didn’t take them seriously.
I presume many others felt the same way.
We had seen this movie many times before. More than a few actors had entered politics with ambition and fanfare.
None had achieved truly significant success.
We had all played Doctor Strange, mentally running through infinite possibilities, and for a neutral observer, the odds of Vijay succeeding seemed abysmally low, close to zero.
To put this into context: Rajini never even entered politics. Kamal… well, let’s just say his political journey mirrored that of his predecessor Sivaji.
Vijayakanth had some success, but largely through coalitions, and he built his organization in a far more structured and methodical way.
Even in neighboring states, Chiranjeevi couldn’t sustain political success. Pawan Kalyan took years to achieve what he eventually did, and that too through alliances.
The last truly successful actor-politician was MGR. But he was no novice. From his earliest films, he consciously crafted an image of a do-gooder, no smoking, no drinking, kind to children, women, and elders. Compare that with Vijay’s early films.
NTR succeeded too, but his rise came in the wake of MGR’s success. There was already a precedent. There was recency bias. And he too carefully maintained a larger-than-life image. He campaigned like a man possessed.
Even when Vijay declared this would be his last movie and that politics would be his only focus, it still felt like another stunt from a wannabe politician.
Then the elections came around.
He couldn’t secure any major coalition.
He didn’t even seem to campaign aggressively. At least, that was the perception.
And it wasn’t all about him anyway. The opposition DMK government had been doing a reasonably good job. There didn’t seem to be any compelling reason for them to lose. If anything, they had every reason to win.
The first time I genuinely believed Vijay might have a chance was when I got stuck on that stretch of road.
Even then, I wondered: will these crowds actually convert into votes?
Because winning elections is far more complicated than drawing crowds. It is a multi player game with complex game theory at play.
Candidates need money. Candidate selection itself is both an art and a science , involving caste equations, local influence, and countless other factors. You need strong grassroots machinery to manage booths on election day. Even the BJP, despite its enormous national apparatus, still struggles with this in Tamil Nadu.
So despite the crowds, I still wasn’t convinced he could emerge as a real political force.
Then came election day.
At 8:00 AM, the first update flashed: TVK was leading in one constituency.
I still dismissed it.
“Early momentum,” I thought. “Let’s wait until noon. Let’s see multiple rounds.”
God, what a turnout. What a victory.
In many ways, it was unprecedented.
What followed over the next few days, the twists, the turns, the chaos, the memes, the frenzy across Tamil social media before he was finally sworn in as Chief Minister , deserves movies and books of its own.
So why did I, most others, and even the mainstream media get this so wrong? And what can we learn from it?
If you want something you don’t have, you must be willing to let go of what you already do have.It takes enormous guts to publicly say: “This is my last movie. Only politics from now on.”Whatever doubts existed about Vijay’s star power or the strength of his movie career can now be put to rest.
Another lesson: it doesn’t matter whether you eventually win or lose. Be in the game. Give it your best. (As they say, jeyikkoroma, thokkiramo, sandai seyyanum) Though honestly, I’m still not sure he truly gave it his absolute best. Because if he had, he might have won an outright majority.
And perhaps the biggest lesson of all: it is not over until it is over. Until the very last moment, it was touch-and-go whether he would secure the numbers needed to form the government and be sworn in as CM.
You are often measured by the enemy you choose. If you position yourself against the number one force, people subconsciously begin to place you in that league as well. From day one, he clearly framed himself as the alternative to the DMK, not to anyone else, and not alongside anyone else. That itself changed perception. Whether people agreed with him or not, they were forced to evaluate him at the scale of the incumbent government rather than as just another newcomer. In many ways, that psychological positioning mattered as much as the campaign itself
There are no fixed rules.Rules are meant to be broken. Most political (or any other) “norms” and frameworks exist partly to discourage newcomers. Caste politics. Cash-for-votes. Booth management. All of it was supposed to matter immensely. And yet, for one election at least, much of it seemed to crumble.
Does that mean this is the new normal? Is this the future? The best answer is: we don’t knowThe second-best answer is: probably not.For all we know, by the next election everything may revert back to how it used to be. In fact, TVK itself could eventually become part of the same system it disrupted.
Is this the end of the DMK? The end of dynasty politics? Again: we don’t know. And probably not.
No one, literally no one can predict the future.
Years ago, to achieve this reach, you need to own a TV channel! Now one can do with social media. In a way, the access is democratized. Make no mistake, still it costs a lot and is not easy to run a social media campaign of this scale. Yet the rules of game have changed!!
On that note, in those days, you need to be constantly available, be on the road. In these days, probably not campaigning and not being available in person was the best thing to do!
“Educated Tamil Nadu voted for an actor instead of progress.”That entire narrative misses the point. Tamil Nadu has always voted for actors. It runs in the political bloodstream of the state. MGR. Jayalalithaa. Anna. Karunanidhi. Stalin. Udhayanidhi. All performers in one form or another. And if you think Udhayanidhi acted in films purely out of love for cinema, you are mistaken. If anything, he is probably regretting that he didn’t act more and that he didn’t launch his son into films earlier. Don’t be surprised if Pradeep Ranganathan and Sivakarthikeyan harbour CM aspirations or if they end up as one!!!
Every generation wants change. Every generation wants its own hero. One generation wanted Anna.Another wanted MGR.And after a long void, this generation wanted Joseph Vijay.
Wishes do come true.Manifestation happens.If you want something strongly enough, sometimes the universe really does conspire to make it happen.Life meets you at your level of audacity.
Take a chance. Take a bet.Think about all the people who joined this party and contested under its banner. They could easily have lost.Instead, they became part of a historic victory that would never have happened otherwise.
And perhaps there’s another lesson here too.In the age of algorithms, we are all prisoners of our own bubbles. We mistake narrative for reality. Most of us thought the DMK would comfortably win. Most of us believed Joseph Vijay was politically naive, unserious, and incapable of succeeding. But those beliefs were often just products of carefully constructed narratives amplified inside our own information ecosystems.
Reality was happening elsewhere. And when reality finally arrived, many experienced a kind of cognitive dissonance.
But the most important thing is this:
This is not a fairytale ending.If anything, it is a fairytale beginning.
So far, everything that has happened feels like real life imitating reel life. Even the swearing-in ceremony itself felt cinematic almost scripted like a movie climax.
Now comes the difficult part.
People expect the dream run to continue.
They expect governance to look the way it does in films.
