Dear Mr Rajinikanth, First, accept my hearty greetings on your being conferred the Icon of the Golden Jubilee award of IFFI by the BJP government at the Centre. Of course, we are not treating this as an effort to paint you in saffron hue. Not that you wish it either.
Browsing: COLUMNS
I was at once amused, astonished and aghast at a couple of news items that appeared one below the other in a national daily. PayTM, a much touted desi payment app, hogged the headlines for two diametrically opposite reasons. One proudly proclaimed that PayTM’s parent company would be bidding for a sizeable stake in the private sector Yes Bank.
In the very first article I had made it clear that the isolation of the State, as most recently reflected in its bucking the national poll trend, is both imposed and self-inflicted. In my view the island at the south east bottom of India is not Sri Lanka, but Tamilnadu.
Left, Right, Centre, Left of Centre, Far Right, Liberal, Conservative and several such sundry stuff: These ideological labels that litter the lexicon are a legacy of the Western academic mindset that believes in categorisation.
The BJP rode to power on the prime poll plank of building a Ram Temple in Ayodhya. The BJP, drawing its lineage from Savarkar’s Hindutva, claims to be an agmark Hindu party seeking Hindu votes for Hindu causes.
Tamilnadu, I can claim with absolute assurance, has always been the the most devout State in the country. This is also the State wherein the most virulent form of modern atheism took roots.
It is a numerical coincidence that the Three Language Formula failed for the third time recently. It was nixed by the Constituent Assembly in 1950; shelved by Nehru in 1963; and now shot down by verbal missiles from TN after Modi’s present regime made a draft proposal.
Let me start with my now familiar invocation: When Sanskrit itself is being challenged, whither Hindi? Really, compared to Tamil, Hindi is a bachcha. It does not have much of a history, let alone literary history. Still, a brief on that brief history would put the present in perspective.
It is time to move from the politics of history to the history of politics. With a small step in this series I am making a giant leap across 900 years to 20th century.