Nobody wants to grow old. But there are times when we wish we were born earlier – sometimes by decades, sometimes by centuries – to witness certain historic events and to meet some interesting people. I had fantasised living through several revolutions. It would’ve been a much more difficult life than now, but the sheer frisson of being part of a revolution exhilarates me. And how enriching it would have been to meet such people as M K Gandhi and Bhagat Singh, Gautam Buddha and Thiruvalluvar, Albert Camus and Franz Kafka, Fyodor Dostoevsky and Jane Austen! And, for that matter, Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin!

Back to reality, I consider myself lucky to have interacted – as a journalist – with M Karunanidhi, though I wish I had met him at least 40 years before I did, in 2000. It was USA Today founder editor Al Neuharth’s motto to “be as nice as possible, only as nasty as necessary”. Karunanidhi almost fit the bill, only that he was at times more nasty than necessary (especially when it came to attacking Hindu rituals). Karunanidhi, when he didn’t like what we wrote, was more direct. He would call and make his displeasure clear.

As I told the platinum jubilee celebrations of ‘Murasoli’ in 2017, once Karunanidhi got a half page of the DMK mouthpiece filled with the choicest of insults at me for writing a piece on the DMK’s failure as an opposition while J Jayalalithaa was riding roughshod in the early 2000s. I liked it. Karunanidhi engaged us.

As I’ve written in this column earlier, Karunanidhi once showed me the door for asking an uncomfortable question. The next day I got a call from his personal assistant K Shanmuganathan asking when the interview would be published and when I would like to meet Kalaignar next. Soon I was sipping coffee at his Gopala­puram house. He nursed no grouse.

Jayalalithaa, another colossal political figure I haven’t interacted with as closely, was more impersonal (even the defamation cases she piled on journalists like me between 2001 and 2005 were filed on her behalf by bureaucrats). Her press conferences were matter of fact. Karunanidhi’s pressers were lively, peppered with quick – sometimes brutal – retorts and crafty evasions. He loved puns and employed them liberally, not always in a politically correct way. It was another matter that he, like Jayalalithaa, had his favourite front benchers among journalists to ask those ‘comfortable’ questions (like Henry Kissinger who once started a press conference thus: Does anyone have any questions for my answers?). But he still took questions from rookies like me.

Karunanidhi used press conferences not just to attack his rivals, but also to send a message to his allies. A classic case was his 2004 post-poll politics. The DMK-led Democratic Progressive Alliance (of which UPA was a part) had won all the 39 seats in Tamil Nadu and the one in Puducherry. The DMK won 15 seats (IUML won a seat contesting on the DMK symbol) and the Congress got 10 seats. Seven DMK MPs were sworn in as ministers in Karunanidhi’s presence in Delhi, three of them with cabinet ranks. But when the portfolios were announced that night, Karunanidhi was upset. T R Baalu, who was given the portfolio of surface transport, was denied the shipping department. Also minister of state for finance S S Palanimanickam did not get the revenue portfolio and minister of state for home S Reghupathy was denied the personnel and internal security portfolios. Karunanidhi rushed back to Chennai and called a press conference at Anna Arivalayam. Before his briefing ended – and he kept it long – Sonia Gandhi yielded to all his demands.

In that government headed by Manmohan Singh, every ally had a say; Karunanidhi had his way.

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Views expressed above are the author's own.

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