Sambar-rasam serials

THE way things are going, Tamil Nadu will soon overtake Indian cricket as the country’s favourite pastime. Just as all of India had once sat glued in front of a TV set and watched Tendulkar swing his bat to extra-cover for a six, it will now watch Jayalalitha’s police make mincemeat out of the Karunanidhi’s men, and Karunanidhi’s men make mincemeat out of Jayalalitha’s police. Indian cricket, in any case, seems to be presently suffering from a chronic attack of DOA, which — in case you are out of the loop — translates as Dead On Arrival. So dead in fact that it really takes the cake, or as Navjot Siddhu in one of his more lucid moments may make put it, a cake with a red cherry on top.

In contrast, the Sambar-Rasam Serials, beamed live to the nation from Tamil Nadu, 24-hours a day, is a bit like ‘Tom and Jerry’ combined in equal parts with WWF wrestling — non-stop action, nail-biting suspense with the occasional skin show by an excitable MP thrown in. This is reality TV brought to its ultimate refinement. To create Survivor — USA’s favourite reality TV programme — for instance, they had to go through so much trouble by first shortlisting the main characters, airdropping them on a deserted Polynesian island and getting them to eat snakes and rats. In the case of Sambhar-Rasam Serials, all they have to do is to post cameras at the state’s well-known hotspots and wait for excitement to spontaneously erupt.

And spontaneous eruptions are known to erupt quite spontaneously in Tamil Nadu. I’m told that this has something to do with the fact that every Tamilian has watched MGR’s Rickshakkaran at least 350 times, which means he/she has spent more time in the innards of a cinema auditorium than outside it and has almost come to believe that he/she is actually MGR in disguise.

There’s another school that believes that it is the copious quantities of rasam — a dish made up of equal parts of tamarind water and dynamite — imbibed by every single resident of the state that makes for this mass volatility. I have it from impeccable sources that the average Tamilian, by the time he or she winds his or her way through life, would on an average have consumed some 2,600 million gallons of this unstable admixture (which may also, incidentally, account for the chronic shortage of water in the state.).

Others insist it is not the rasam by itself that makes Tamilians natural pyromaniacs but the fact that they have to imbibe the rasam — usually served rather perversely on a banana leaf — faster than it overruns the said banana leaf. This sisyphean task leaves them not just wet about the elbows and nursing strained muscles of the upper arm to boot, but imbues them with a profound dissatisfaction with life in general. As a consequence, some are driven into committing suicide or burning buses when Jayalalitha’s Pomeranian falls ill or Karunanidhi misplaces his glasses.

What makes life even more uncertain in Tamil Nadu is the fact that truth —generally regarded elsewhere in the country as an absolute — comes in two varieties in Tamil Nadu. You generally believe the version you vote for and the TV channel you tune in to. For instance, take the events that transpired on the night of July 29, when Jayalalitha’s police paid Karunanidhi a visit at midnight. It was either a most dastardly, almost murderous violation of human rights or a courtesy call to honour a revered leader by escorting him to the nearest police station, depending on whether you watched Sun TV, which gave you the DMK version of the truth, or Jaya TV, which gave you the AIADMK version of the truth.

It was the same, last Sunday. If you saw Sun TV’s representation of the events played out by Marina beach when DMK cadres were locked in battle with the Chennai police, you would have been treated to grisly closeups of blood flowing freely from the wounds of DMK bodies and you would have sworn that this is police brutality on an unprecedented scale. But Jaya TV would have told you an equally horrendous tale of DMK excesses, with picturesque visuals of burning police vehicles and a stomach-curdling shot of a severed finger of a policeman.

So where will all this leave this state with a glorious history of Sangam literature and the great Pallava dynasty? Where Tanjore bronzes gleam in the sun and kanakambaram blossoms set womens’ heads alight? Where the bleached sands of the Coromandel coast melt into an azure-hued Bay? On the brink of a catatonic fit, in fact.

The only way out for the Tamilian, at least to my mind, is to stop voting for both Jayalalitha and Karunanidhi and firmly desist the pleasures of Sun TV and Jaya TV. Or, if that is not possible, give up rasam altogether.

Earlier Columns