From the India Today archives (1978) | The celluloid politician

(NOTE: This article was originally published in the India Today issue August 15, 1978)

It is not only the dark glasses that perpetuate the air of mystery, it is the man himself. In the classic tradition of celluloid heroes, Tamil Nadu’s celebrated matinee idol M.G. Ramachandran, now the state’s fifth chief minister, is a law unto himself. Like the rarest bird of paradise he is virtually impossible to pin down at any given time. In the state capital of Madras the most hard boiled journalists have long since given up. The chief minister rarely meets the press, and almost never grants exclusive interviews.

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His encounters with the public are restricted to public meetings and presiding over occasional political or film functions. The aura of secrecy that surrounds him, and which he apparently thrives on since his rise to stardom in the surrealistic cine-political ethos of Tamil Nadu, has been deliberately cultivated over two dramatic decades.

Moving from the shadowy world of studios and starlets into the open arena of the state Assembly, MGR projects himself as an unlikely combination of Greta Garbo and Howard Hughes. He employs some of the diversionary tactics of both, and supplements them with others of his own creation.

He is seldom known to flatly refuse an interview, instead, he is liable, as one newspaper editor in Madras pointed out, to lead any interviewer on a wild goose chase lasting a couple of years. "We are still waiting for an interview we requested when he became chief minister," admitted the editor, "and so far I have only managed to speak to him once on the phone."

There are various interpretations offered for his elusiveness. The commonest one is his sense of insecurity in face-to-face encounters which might explain the presence of the dark-glasses he never sheds. Others vary from his alleged inability to answer uncomfortable questions to the mediocrity of his intellect which he fears he might expose.

However, most o