JOIN USDMK chief cites silent movies to defend Raja
The Tamil Nadu chief minister went on the offensive on behalf of former telecom minister A Raja. It was yet a benign line of attack, with Karunanidhi asserting that the projected loss sounds “incredulous”. He did not name the CAG though.
Interestingly, he made these provocative remarks at a function here to release the songs of a forthcoming Tamil film ‘Ilangnan’, scripted by him and which is his 75th movie script in a cinema career spanning seven decades in Tamil filmdom. The DMK leader’s daughter and MP Kanimozhi, part of the Radia tapes, was also present.
Drawing on his long association with Tamil cinema right from its silent era days, Karunanidhi said characters in a silent movie, then screened in tents, were often described by a narrator. For example, the appearance of Bhimesenan in old Tamil mythological films, used to be prefixed with the words as those whose every tooth was “spaced out by 20 miles”!
“And the space in a tooth can be 30 miles wide! If such were the hyperbolic descriptions, imagine how wide a demon’s mouth must be,” chuckled Karunanidhi. When epics were thus narrated, a mesmerised audience tended to believe them without analysing whether it could be true or not.
He said the corruption amount now touted (in the context of the 2G spectrum allocation scam under UPA I in 2008), shared a similar dimension with the much-hyped descriptions of epic characters depicted in Tamil mythological films.
Karunanidhi wondered how any “literate society with a keen scientific sense believe that one person could have been responsible for such a huge scam, the figures attributed to which when written down would occupy an entire page.” But people seemed to believe in it just as film-goers then enjoyed descriptions of Bhima, he mused.
But today’s society was not as gullible as film-goers of 1930’s and 1940s’, Karunanidhi pointed out. Corruption on such a monumental scale, “could perhaps be done by a robot, but is humanely impossible by one single person,” argued the DMK chief, turning to superstar Rajnikanth on his side who played the robot with ace in his latest film, “Enthiran”.