[adsexpist]

Alagiri is in a terrible mood these days, according to usually unreliable rumours. No longer are the mellifluous tunes of yesteryears, such as the ones he sang on his son’s wedding, playing back in his mind. He is trying to recover from the drubbing in the elections. It is not going to be easy. He had hoped that seats under his control would be safe and he could show the DMK who was the real heir. Now it was all academic, thanks to Raja, Kanimozhi, his father and even Stalin. He doesn’t know who he is angry with the most.
The day results were announced, a shamiana had come up outside his house, a television was placed there, and Alagiri and his supporters gathered to watch, prepared to celebrate. When the rout became clear, the shamiana came down abruptly, and Alagiri retreated inside his house. There he remains to this day, a prisoner of circumstances. Every day he scours the papers for signs of hope. Today the papers are saying that Time magazine has placed A Raja’s 2G exploits a notch below the infamous Watergate scandal, and that Raja has leapfrogged to jostle for global attention along with Muammar Gaddafi. Reading this suddenly something snaps. This was the man who brought his dreams crashing. Now he was world famous! Rascal! There would probably now be a separate chapter for his villainy, complete with footnotes. The footnotes alone would probably run to the length of an entire volume of an encyclopedia. How much he achieved in such little time!

Alagiri could never understand how some people had consistently projected him, Karunanidhi’s son, as being a rowdy sort, a fiction that nevertheless stuck and invited leery looks whenever he pitched for a bigger political role. Even his father believed this canard. He had always maintained to his father that the party should dump Raja, that poster boy for scandals. But the Raja group held powerful sway over the Kalaignar. Even now, you are supporting him, Alagiri had warned repeatedly, futilely. Kalaignar had given him a helpless look. It is for the greater good of the party, he had claimed. Alagiri had seen through this. Just as he saw through the Dalit card. Kalaignar claimed DMK had an enormous Dalit vote bank. Alagiri never believed it. He wanted to burn all the booklets protesting Raja’s innocence, Stalin got printed for distribution.

He wishes Jaya TV had obtained footage of him swinging out at Raja at New Delhi airport. That footage would have definitely saved his face. Now it was all unsubstantiated rumours. One maintained that all Alagiri was able to do was to shout at Raja. The other was slightly more reassuring: that he had actually managed to land a blow. The third bothered him the most of all: that others intervened and prevented any other blow. Maybe he should have got one of his supporters to film the exchange on a mobile phone and upload it on Youtube. He ought to have done the same thing when he distributed sweets when Raja was finally arrested. What was Raja doing in jail now? Talking Tamil with the TN police posted in the inner perimeter. At this rate, the postal address for Kalaignar TV headquarters could well change. Should he now place orders for sweets for Kanimozhi?

-Express buzz