After Ilaiyaraja, it’s now the turn of Bhagyaraj to endorse Narendra Modi. The BJP has certainly hit the bull’s eye as far as their choice of film personalities to back them goes. Ilaiyaraja is not just a celebrity but he is someone Tamils see as one of their own, a man so rooted that he...
Who is Dravidian is a perennial question in Tamil public life. Even the Ilaiyaraja controversy has meandered to that question. The Ilaiyaraja row is not a naturally occurring event that is the job of journalists to uncover and write about. It is a staged event orchestrated to create hype,...
The current crisis in Sri Lanka makes us wonder where Sri Lankan Tamils would be now if Prabhakaran had settled for peace at some point. At the beginning of the Fourth Eelam War that destroyed him and his organization, he said the Sri Lankan government was just not genuinely interested in...
Marking the 7th anniversary of the launch of the PMMY Mudra Loans scheme last week, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman said, “It is noteworthy that more than 34.42 crore loan accounts amounting to Rs.18.60 lakh crore have been opened under the Scheme for the creation of income generating...
Mudra loans have been touted as a gamechanger in making unsecured credit available to those engaged in small businesses who are outside the corporate sector. Launched in 2015, the Pradhan Mantri MUDRA Yojana (PMMY) provides loans up to Rs 10 lakh to non-corporate, non-farm small/micro...
The Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) and its leader, Tamil Nadu chief minister M. K. Stalin have, in the recent past, been seeking a national role. It has sought to project its brand of social justice – economic populism and social engineering in favour of backward classes – on the national...
In its reasoning rejecting exclusive 10.5% reservation for vanniyar community, the Supreme Court has held that the state government has the power to order such caste-based sub quotas but the 2021 legislation was not backed by recent data, analysis and scientific reasoning. The Supreme Court has...
The second budget of Palanivel Thiyagarajan did not deliver the big bang reforms that were feared by some and eagerly expected by others but continued the Dravidian model that chief minister M K Stalin has talked about. A range of schemes in education, health, civic infrastructure,...
Some analysts are arguing that a pan-Indian Dravidian model may be the best way to defeat the BJP. They have a simplistic view of the so-called Dravidian model of Tamil Nadu as just politics based on OBC empowerment against upper caste groups and economic populism. Secular thinkers see that the...
Maaran is a journalist movie. In Indian cinema, there is a good cop movie. There is a bad cop movie. There is a thief movie. There is a village movie. Like these there is a journalist movie. Just as cop movies portray policemen as ridiculously corrupt and horribly brutal or super efficient and...
