In one swift stroke, a wave of the hand in true Rajini style across the forehead of a co-born, the ultimate rationalist that Karunanidhi is, has killed two birds. Through that symbolic gesture he has not only ensured the rebirth of dravidianism, but also re-baptised even Periyar who through no fault of his happened to sport a tilak.
Lucky Periyar, he was not forced to suffer the ignominy of wearing a sacred thread as his ‘hollow’ers apprehended. Otherwise, even he, despite his rationalist credentials would have been discarded by the current rationalists who cannot stand such a sight. So what if Periyar is just a statue today. He dare not wear a tilak or the thread.
You may wonder what sort of rationalism is it that fails to distinguish between a statue and the real thing. Why should they get so incensed if some one, most probably a dravidian, had applied tilak on the statue. After all, these are men who shun superstition and for them the presence of a tilak should be as irrelevant as the absence of it.
But paradoxically and one may say, even quixotically, these very paragons of logic are now upset about it, so upset that there was a literal tilak wiping ceremony right under the aegis of the Thaanai thalaivan who acted the head priest. So the rationalists believe, very superstitiously that through the symbolic gesture of erasing the tilaks, the dravidian movement has been enriched and enhanced.
It would have been a really funny sight watching the co-borns standing in groups wiping off their tilaks and rubbing the ‘stained’ hands on their trousers- or was it karai vetti- and eventually ending up with tilaks all over their body. In their bid to re-dravidise themselves, the co-borns have only ended up as more saffron than the saffronites. They will realise it when they literally wash all their dirty linen in private.
It is this kind of deception that is the hallmark of the dravidian movement as propagated by the current rulers. They break rules and establish new ones which are worse than the earlier ones. Of course, the wily leaders know that what they are advocating is plain gibberish, for their own lives and wives too, are rooted in faith and such other un-dravidian tenets.
All their outpourings are only for the consumption of the gullible ‘dravidians’, a human mass that they have successfully kept volatile and backward so that they themselves can thrive. For, the first thing any sensible, literate and forward looking person would do is to consign these men, the thalaivans and kudimagans, to the dustbin of history along with their antique rhetoric and half-boiled ideologies, lock, stock and barrel.
That these men are still around in public life and positions of power too, is unfortunately a sad commentary on the prevalent levels of intellect-an irrationality that these rationalists will not bother to explain.
The double-tongued leaders have really no shame or self realisation. The gap between what they preach and what they practise is wider than the Grand Canyon. They shun rituals but are religiously ritualistic when it comes to their own practices. They detest idol worship, but themselves idolise their leaders through adulatory prefixes and suffixes.
They ridicule holy hymns but sing paeans lauding their own thalaivans who love to wallow in those illusions of their own greatness. These leaders talk of self-respect, meaning probably the respect they have for their own self, but would not hesitate to sacrifice it at any altar that can grant them the boon of power. Of course, once in power they can easily manage the pelf part.
They hate symbolism and superstition but would not hesitate to wear a black shirt or an yellow towel. Perhaps herein lies a revelation…that their ideologies are as mutable as the shirts they wear or the towels on their shoulders. And they wipe off the barbaric tilaks, but run a family magazine titled Kunkumam.
Their history of hypocrisy is painfully endless. The tilak affair is just another milestone in their fast track to despondency and doom. Already, Tamilnadu, thanks to these paragons is perhaps the most isolated State in the country, what with Tamilians, slowly being left out of the rat race for prosperity that is being witnessed the world over.
With its rulers getting primitive by the day, through their tireless tirade against tilaks, English, Hindi, archanas and such other ‘dangerous’ enemies of dravidianism, one can only wring one’s hands in despair at the havoc being wrought by these irrational rationalists. Little wonder that, in his message to a national magazine a printer’s devil has truthfully stated that, ‘TN will be a model state for industrial activity in the 1st century’. Fate.
e-mail the writer at
[email protected]