Last week, I was walking to the work site through the forest near west coast. Images of vipers beneath fallen leaves came to my mind thanks to wildlife documentaries. My footsteps on fallen leaves were the loudest sound around. It was something close to adventure, the tall trees, the watchfulness, the world reduced to what is beneath your foot.
At times, I stay in a place with no internet for weeks. I like it better. So, when I say broken road, I don’t mean inconvenience. I mean a broken promise.
Back home on the evening of May 11, 2026, I stumbled upon a post on X. A man named Ramesh — TVK Ramesh — was being sworn in as a Member of the Legislative Assembly. Alongside the visuals of the oath-taking, someone had posted an old message from his account, dated July 2022:
Sir I have seen your job vacant details. I have experience in Tamil content writing. I have worked in Singapore.
Another person shared a WhatsApp message from November 2020:
Hai Sir. Am Ramesh From Chengalpattu. I completed BE mech and worked in automobile related industry. From the start am interested in Media. A resume forwarded to a mail ID. Kindly help me sir.
Four years between that message and this oath.
I felt something looking at the screenshots I took. A kind of emotion I could not name. The sight of someone like Ramesh, genuinely from nowhere, no family in politics, no caste network, walking in with his family to take oath.
I have friends who were fluent in political vocabulary. We were serious about ideology in college. The seriousness that felt like it mattered, and perhaps it did. Some of my friends are still serious. Or they think that is the seriousness. They discuss Hindutva, Gramsci, Ambedkar, the slow erosion of institutions.
When I share a story like TVK Ramesh to my friends, the conversation moves quickly to ideological framework. What does this mean for the consolidation of the opposition? Is TVK ideologically coherent enough to hold? Vijay is a populist. Can populism without ideology sustain itself against the right-wing machinery? These are the questions. I do not dismiss them.
TVK has no ideology. This is the charge, and it is largely accurate. What they have is a program. A way of selecting people, a way of running an organization, a recruitment mechanism that works for someone like TVK Ramesh.
The opposition party DMK has an ideology. Social justice, legacy and real history. They also have Education Ministers whose caste has never mattered, but caste is what gets discussed first during nominations.
I drive home through broken roads, and my street has no road at all. Trust me on this: a local politician can decide which street of an area deserves a road and which street doesn’t. There are numbers. Booth wise, detailed, managed. That’s not ideology.
A government with ideology built the broken road. A government with ideology left it broken. Another government with ideology left it broken again. The road does not care about the ideology. It just remembers what was done to it.
TVK put Ramesh on a list. That is an action. Maybe small, early and possibly fragile. But it is something ideological politics once promised and then forgot.
They say Vijay influenced children to campaign for him. That parents voted TVK because their children insisted. Maybe. Somewhere, in some household, a child’s enthusiasm could have mattered. But people don’t vote for someone just because their kid insists. Maybe the parents had been walking on broken roads long enough. The children just gave them a reason to stop waiting.
I am not a fan of Vijay. I don’t even watch that genre of movies. But I watch him now as a politician, with some hope, despite all the odds, despite the naivety. Hope is the best thing even when it is temporary.
My friends think I am going insane. Or that I have lost my sense of political reality. Perhaps they don’t drive home through broken roads. Or perhaps I have been walking through the forest long enough to know the difference between a map of the terrain and the terrain itself. The map can be ideologically perfect. You can still step on a viper beneath a fallen leaf.
The fallen leaves underfoot. The loudest sound of the moment. Ramesh walking in with his family. No one knows yet what is underneath
Something Tamil Nadu had not shown me in my lifetime. I am not saying the Utopia has arrived. But I thought the story of TVK Ramesh needed to be said.