A dashing young Karunanidhi welcomes you to Trichy. The dominant recurring image on the line-up of posters all the way to the DMK rally is of the Dravidian, 30-something, at his vintage best — playwright, screenwriter, public speaker, poet and uncanny politician. A receding memory for the greying Tamil voters and no memory at all for the younger.

Last seen on TV, the biggest surviving star of India’s regional politics was amidst an extended family and air coolers, prostate at Marina Beach on a tame Gandhian fast for his brother Tamils in Sri Lanka. Hardly counts in Dravidian dramaturgy which requires you to stand as tall as a Chennai statue and thunder into the heavens. When the man himself appears in flesh and blood before the Trichy crowd, it is no big help either. The only thing dramatic is the sudden manifestation of a station wagon on the slope beside the dais to rousing battle cries from the public address system. The sound effect doesn’t prepare you for what follows. The leader is eased into a wheelchair and rolled centrestage. A sad audio-video mismatch.

DMK has a problem. Its long lost action hero MGR is entrenched in the rival legacy. Vaiko, once its very own speaking hero next only to Kalaignar himself and eminently outsourceable under the circumstances, has lent his voice to Jayalalithaa.

At the evening May Day rally called to present the six Lok Sabha candidates from the Trichy region, on his orthopaedic chair tilted slightly up, the mentor who refused to mentor sits virtually alone gazing up at the darkening horizon. Sons Stalin and Azhagiri and daughter Kanimozhi are absent. Even the most important of the candidates, Mani Shankar Aiyar, has played truant.

... contd.