Film financiers used to call MGR ‘Minimum-Guarantee Ramachandran.’ His name sold the film. Sixteen years after the actor’s death, the ‘MGR Vote’ remains Jayalalithaa’s core strength. But then it is a graying, declining vote. For now, Amma has found a supplement—‘‘Prathamar Vajpayee’’ (Prime Minister Vajpayee). It goes better with the Dravidian tongue than ‘‘Atalji.’’As always in this poll-time filmy land, politics manifests visually. This time DMK has a problem though. Its poster has to accommodate one too many awesome personalities—from the mandatory Karunanidhi to PMK’s shaky Dr. Ramadoss and throw in Son Stalin without offending the volatile Vaiko.The designer would have cursed the alliance’s winnable arithmetic. Friendless AIADMK, however, has ample room for display. Amma takes the pride of place and size in its publicity material and mentor MGR has been shrunk to accommodate a medium-sized ‘‘Prathamar.’’ No Rajnikant here. The superstar makes a cameo appearance in separate posters.On the soundtrack, MGR still reigns. A local music band blasts the daylights out of the audience waiting for Amma at Chennai’s Sheikh Dawood Street with vintage songs from MGR movies. You need to hold the crowd that has been sweating it out for some four hours. The off-key musical exorcism ends when the singers and the listeners have had enough. A party orator takes over and reminds the mostly Muslim crowd that it was Amma who made a Tamil Muslim the country’s President. Now she is giving you if not a Tamil at least a wholly Indian PM. The last word is left to the star of the show. Jayalalithaa arrives and from the lit-up front seat of her Trekker makes her points in a signature monotone that stands out in the emotive Tamil pollscape. ‘‘Do you want an Italian PM or an Indian Prathamar?’’ The foreigner issue doesn’t seem to cut much ice with the crowd. The older lot in these parts would have heard enough of this foreigner business. Karunanidhi called MGR a Malayali foreigner, rivals called Karunanidhi a Telugu foreigner, Jayalalithaa has Karnataka origins and today nobody sees Vaiko as a less-than-Tamil Naidu.Finally Jaya returns from Italy and departs with a message: ‘‘Vote for the Prathamar who’ll soon link rivers and give you drinking water.’’ This is a surprise. Why is she highlighting an opposition-friendly poll issue that has seen more Tamil elections than she has—water? Has she sighted hope? The Cauvery district has had the rainiest May in two decades. Will Rain God reverse those POTA-deserving exit polls a bit? At the street corner where she spoke, the hand pumps have been dry for four years and water arrives on trucks once in two days. A ten-minute walk from here is Bay of Bengal. In TN water, like politics, remains a grand spectacle.
