Karunanidhi

#Karunanidhi was a person whose name and face , I was aware of,  from my boyhood . Firstly because of his dark glasses , secondly because the name of his party which sounded somewhat different to read out from the newspaper to my grandpa , who ironically also wore dark glasses after his cataract operation.

My father , an iconoclast and a very severe critic of caste system was very fond of Karunanidhi . And his insistence on speaking only his mother tongue Tamil made him a hero to my mother . So basically even though I lived far away,  Karunanidhi made an impact on me , as a boy.

Later , with time , I found Karunanidhi to be a permanent fixture of Indian politics. His party lost sometimes , then coming back , losing again , regaining strength  and so on . But he went on with the grind as a politician for the Tamils and as a patriarch for his family.

With his death a curtain falls over the Dravida Kazagham movement of seven decades. With numerous offshoots it is more of a confusion now to decide who really holds the mantle. But the impact of Karunanidhi on Indian and Tamil politics for the last 50 years was great and can't be just wished away.

All human beings have their bright sides and dark corners . And all leaders have their weak points. We may not be always in sync with all their actions and ideologies.  Death renders everything null and void and we focus on the good things of their persona . So has it been , so be it. Let us remember him as a long-standing old banyan tree of Indian politics that has been uprooted today in nature's own cycle.

But apart from being a political collosus , he was also a poet , novelist and a celebrated script writer.  As a  person who loves art and culture , my homage to the great Kalaignar . His memory be always borne in the heart of his numerous followers.