https://m.timesofindia.com/city/chennai/tamil-nadu-cm-m-k-stalin-announces-rs-39-crore-memorial-for-karunanidhi/amp_article-show/85612246.cms?fbclid=IwAR0ecMp4ktrGQdJIwLIzYo4QNJuph98tYVfs55k9i8gzbwNa8CojQ7Npvaw
Our Tamil Nadu politicians are a cozy country club indeed …. When it suits their separately common (pardon the oxymoron) interest, they will set aside all their political differences, and even personal antipathy, to endorse and support a pet-project of the ruling establishment, while at the same time, giving scant regard, or no more than two idiomatic hoots, to what the public itself might have to say about it. This present proposal to build a ₹39 crore mausoleum for a departed doyen of the DMK Party is one such project.
The scenic Marina Beach runs along the long coastline of the Bay of Bengal for a few kilometres. The beach, we all know, is a favourite recreation and family picnicking spot for millions of city residents. The Beach sands are where children run around playing and gleefully entertaining themselves; street urchins have fun and frolic playing cricket and football; health-fanatics stroll there briskly every morning and evening and do their physical exercises….
Marina Brach is probably the only spot still left surviving, in the congested and squalid city of Chennai, which is large and sprawling enough to accommodate an assembly of several thousands of ordinary people gathering on it in a show of democratic solidarity for any common cause or purpose …. the Jallikkaatu event is a case to remember.
And now on such a scenic favourite spot of the common people, another mausoleum is going to be built which will intrude into an iconic public space of this city that already is the location of two other similar funerary monuments — one of CN Annadurai and the other of J Jayalalitha— both of which already have encroached upon and now occupy large tracts of the beach which, by the way, everybody seems to forget, is really the property of the common citizenry of Chennai.
The government has the wholehearted sanction of the State Legislative Assembly to go ahead with the construction of Karunanidhi’s mausoleum. Does the Assembly’s assent to the proposal meet with the larger public purpose? Has anyone cared to ask if this is what the ordinary citizenry of the city want ?
The public should never forget the encroachments on their favourite Marina Beach, in the last few decades, have come one on the heels of another other in the same fashion : without a care for public opinion at large and simply going by the fog leaf of a majority vote in the State Assembly:
1. First came in late 1960s , when the then DMK government built a long string of a dozen or more aesthetically most ungainly-looking statues — of Tamil historic personages — , all along what then used to be the picturesque Marina Beach Driveway ….
2. Then came the Anna Samadhi.
3. Then came the statue of the actor-thespian Sivaji Ganesan .
4. Then came Amma Samadhi.
5. And now there’s going to be Kalaignar Samadhi !
At this rate , one wonders , what really will be left still remaining of the beautiful Marina beach that the ordinary citizens of Chennai City can call as their very own ?! At this rate, the whole Beach, in the course of the next few decades, might turn out to be no more than a touristic graveyard that houses the Tombs of Tamil political bigwigs. Is this what the citizenry of Chennai wants ?
I hasten to add here that I do not in anyway diminish the contributions of M Karunanidhi to the state of TamilNadu. Not at all. But I feel he deserves to be memorialised in the hearts and remembrances of the people … not on their streets that are already chockablock with memorial statues, archways, wayside Pillaiyaar and Amman kovils , Annai Mary shrines and ‘darghas’…. Right in the middle of the arterial Mount Road there is the statue of Annadurai , Kamaraj , Muthuramalinga Thevar, EV Ramaswami Naicker … and, in fact, there is one for Karunanidhi too already!
Are these all not already more than sufficient memorialisation of the overcrowded political pantheon of Tamil Nadu that we Tamilians want displayed on the cramped, ugly, labyrinth of thoroughfares of this city?
Why now must we allow the same creeping encroachment of public space that has been happening imperceptibly — glacially but surely — over the last several years on Mount Road .. oops!.. sorry, Anna Salai… to repeat itself again on the Marina Beach too ?
Let us remember that in Tamil Nadu’s glorious ancient history, there were far greater personages than those we seek to memorialise today … The great Kings, Rulers and Poets of the ancient past never stooped to build vainglorious statues or mausoleums for themselves or for their political masters or heroes. Instead, those great historical Tamil leaders built structures and institutions that served the larger public good …. They built dams, anicuts, great temples, massive forts, majestic riverfronts public gardens, ports, bridges and so forth …
Why on earth are the present day politicians of Tamil Nadu so fixated on this fetish of morbid mausoleums? Has it got something to do with the proposed ₹.390 million outlay benefitting or rewarding ultimately someone … in some way .. … somewhere.. ?
As a very concerned longtime Chennai Citizen, I want to simply show solidarity with like-minded fellowmen : Even if you are powerless and cannot really do anything to stop what the Government has already set out to do … at least please do give voice to your concern that the Marina Beach itself will get monumentalised in time as Chennai’s beachside grim mausoleum!
Sudarshan Madabushi