When I first saw him, he was 75. It was a press conference in the Tamil Nadu chief minister’s office that lasted for 30 minutes. The room was sparsely crowded, with few well-informed scribes posing questions. The presser, happening a few days after the budget session,was on taxes.
I was with my senior K.N. Arun, a renowned name among journalists. He had briefed me about the press conference, the likely questions that would crop up, and how to report it. My excitement knew no bounds when I stepped into the chief minister's chamber for the first time. This was my first ever encounter with the man with yellow shawl around the neck and dark glasses.
Until then, I had only heard and read about him as an astute politician, who made some shrewd political moves and was known to be the most powerful regional satrap in India.
For the next one year, I never went for any of his press conferences or meetings. A year after that presser, I had moved to Jaya TV which made me get more attached to the AIADMK, the party backing the channel. The alliance talks at Anna Arivalayam, the rainbow alliance that was cobbled up by the DMK with Vaiko’s MDMK, differences in alliance talks and Vaiko later meeting Jayalalithaa were all just news to me in 2001.
Later, everyday meetings at Anna Arivalayam, the DMK headquarters, became part of my daily routine. Waiting in front of Karunanidhi’s closed room at the DMK headquarters, sometimes with a packet of groundnuts, was part of my evening affairs in March-April 2001. In May 2001, Jayalalithaa was sworn in as the chief minister. I chose to be part of her convoy rather than going to Anna Arivalayam to hear Karunanidhi listing the reasons for the party's failure.
On June 30, 2001, came the midnight arrest—the day when I witnessed the real rivalry between the AIADMK and the DMK. The AIADMK was rejoicing. The DMK’s anger knew no bounds. A day after the arrest, when I was at the Egmore court, there was an attack on us. Our video cameras were hit. My cameraman and I ran for cover and managed to reach the office somehow. In the afternoon, when Union minister George Fernandes called on Karunanidhi at his CIT Colony residence to express solidarity, Jaya TV crew was at the receiving end of the wrath of DMK cadres who were upset with their leader's arrest. The green cable that reached the camera from the microphone without the Jaya TV logo was traced and cameraman was attacked. Again we ran for cover; this time, we ran from CIT Colony to Poes Garden without stopping.
In the next few days, I was there at Anna Arivalayam whenever Karunanidhi had a press conference. “You are from Jaya TV. I know why you ask this question,” he had this to say whenever I posed a question and his answers always had a pun. Once, when I questioned him about an agency report about an alleged argument between him and Murasoli Maran, he replied, “how do you say.” When I quoted a particular agency, his immediate response was that the agency reporters could be liars.
Back then, every DMK meeting was just another assignment. At every meeting, I would hear, “Kallakudi kanda Karunanidhi (Karunanidhi who witnessed Kallakudi).” It was only when I read the late DMK chief's book Nenjukku Neethi that I learnt about the 1953 Kallakudi agitation and how it is a watershed movement in the history of Tamil Nadu. I realised how shrewd a politician Karunanidhi was when he led this agitation at Kallakudi when I read poet Kannadasan’s autobiography Vanavasam.
My fondness for Karunanidhi increased when I moved out from Jaya TV, or rather thrown out to Tamil news weekly. It was the time the editorial team of the weekly decided to go for a collector’s edition on Karunanidhi. The interview and questions were my responsibility. I had put across some 65 questions to him. He answered them all in an entrancing, poetic Tamil, laced with puns. To one question, “What is your favourite food?” he replied, “thanthai pidithu, thaai samaithu kodutha meen kuzhambu pidikkum. Anaal indru meen pidiththu thara thanthaiyum illai, samaithu thara thaaiyum illai, doctor kodutha unavu pattiyalil meenum illai (I like the fish curry prepared by my mother made of the fish caught by father. But now, my father and mother are no more. And fish curry is not there in my diet given by my doctor). I was thrilled when I read this. His sense of prose and poetry touched me.
Years later, when the astute politician in him slowly gave way to nepotism between 2006-2011, after a in-depth cover story on the family and its business, titled 'Kubera Samraijayam' and a series of cover stories against the DMK and the first family, I was again a victim of DMK’s fury. Karunanidhi's family members filed defamation cases against me, and someone by the name Silanthi wrote a lengthy piece against me in the DMK mouthpiece Murasoli.
In the wake of elections in 2011, there appeared an image of a big octopus in the last page of Murasoli. The head of the octopus had an image of Jayalalithaa and the limbs had the faces of senior Brahmin journalists. A blurred photo of me too was on one of the limbs with my name—Lakshmi Subramanian—under it. This shook me more than the defamation cases filed against me as I was made to clarify that one does not become a Brahmin because of one's name.
But after the elections, whenever I approached him for an interview or a guest piece, through his personal secretary Shanmuganathan, he would always oblige. When I saw him last at Rajaji Hall in a coffin, as a journalist who wasn't exactly an admirer of Karunanidhi, I realise that Tamil Nadu lost a leader with great political acumen.
There won't be anymore of those indefatigable scripts, no more Q and As and no more guest columns. Tamil Nadu has, forever, lost its statesman.