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 The eulogies for Muthuvel Karunanidhi are similarly out of date because this passionate champion of the Dravidian movement and the Tamil legacy had morphed into the head of a political dynasty by the time of his death.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