Every time a senior politician dies, contemporaries set up a
chorus of “irreparable loss”, “nation in mourning”, and so on, oblivious to the
fact that most of them were living fossils of a time long past. The eulogies
for Muthuvel Karunanidhi are similarly out of date because this passionate
champion of the Dravidian movement and the Tamil legacy had morphed into the
head of a political dynasty by the time of his death. The rhetoric had become
mechanical, the passion for Tamil muted