When lakhs and lakhs of youth set out from their homes all over the State to V Salai, an obscure village in Tamil Nadu’s Villupuram district on Sunday, braving the boiling sun, none of them knew what was in store for them at the ‘Victory Principles Conference’ called by their matinee idol Vijay, who has taken a new avatar as political leader. For, everything about the conference was kept concealed other than the fact that Vijay will be present in flesh and blood, which promised the hordes of women and men of impressionable age, a rendezvous with their celluloid icon. Otherwise even after the meeting opened with hype and excitement, there wasn’t anything substantial that it offered to the State’s quintessential polity.
Vijay’s political ambition is not anything new. Over the years, even as he was looking for his glorious spot under the klieg light, he was also openly aspiring for a career in politics. After years of planning, reluctance, and procrastination, he took the plunge, much to the delight of his fans who had overnight become political workers, owing allegiance to a party that is all set to field candidates in the State Assembly elections in 2026. Since Vijay’s earlier forays into the political ramparts had been few and far between and muted, and not even his fans knew what his ideological moorings were.
Anyway, they set out to listen to his maiden political address for they should know for themselves the principles, aims and objectives of their own party and accept them as their guiding philosophy. It was a kind of blind political date for the young people, who had hitherto gone gung-ho over the films of Vijay. Living up to their expectations, the otherwise reticent Vijay broke into eloquence for about 45 minutes unveiling his policies, principles, views, ideologies, present peeves, and future action plans — among them was one to start a branch of the State Secretariat at Madurai, for whatever reason — that just gave rise to a sense of déjà vu.
To put it otherwise, there was nothing that came with a whiff of fresh air from the new party that was putting old wine in a new bottle. Or most of what he said he would do was nothing but the political rhetoric that the State has been hearing for over 60 years after the Dravidian rule. There was also nothing exciting about the conference, perhaps except for the ramp and the leader’s catwalk, picking up a flurry of shawls in party hues that were flung at him from the sides.
With no refreshing promise for the people who have seen too many such launches of new parties, whose harangue would raise hopes but fade into oblivion subsequently, a reading of the Biblical verses that gave us the ‘new wine in old bottle’ metaphor may help put things in perspective. Those verses go: And no one puts new wine into old wineskins. If he does, the new wine will burst the skins and it will be spilled, and the skins will be destroyed. But new wine must be put into fresh wineskins. And no one after drinking old wine desires new, for he says, ‘The old is good.’
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