By Ananya Sharma and Arun Upadhayay 
Chennai, May 5: There is a video doing the rounds on X today that has nothing to do with vote counts or alliance talks or the usual noise that fills Tamil Nadu on election result day. It is just a young man crying on a stage.
He is not crying because he lost. He is crying because someone believed in him.
R. Sabarinathan, 32 years old, from Virugambakkam in Chennai, broke down the moment Thalapathy Vijay called his name at a Tamilaga Vettri Kazhagam public gathering weeks ago. He walked up, touched Vijay’s feet, and wept. His father, Rajendran, stood nearby, watching. Rajendran, who has spent 15 years as Vijay’s personal driver, did not say anything. He did not need to.
That video is everywhere today because Sabarinathan is winning.
The Man Behind the Candidate
People keep calling this a fairy tale, and it is easy to see why. But there is something more straightforward going on here than a fairy tale suggests.
Rajendran is not a political family patriarch. He is not a party veteran with connections going back decades. He drove Vijay’s car. Early mornings, late nights, film shoots, campaign rallies. Fifteen years of that. And somewhere in those years, his son grew up watching, staying close to the world his father moved through every day.
Sabarinathan studied at a local college in Virugambakkam. He knew the area not from a campaign briefing but because he lived there, walked those roads, and knew the people. When TVK launched in 2024, he joined as a grassroots worker. No fanfare. Just work.
When Vijay announced the Virugambakkam ticket for him, even people inside TVK were caught off guard. The opposition certainly did not see it coming. A driver’s son, in a serious urban constituency, up against the DMK’s machinery? The polite version of the reaction was skepticism.
What Vijay Said on That Stage
He did not make a speech about meritocracy or inclusive politics. He just said what was true.
“My driver, Rajendran, has been with me for 15 years. Now, his son Sabarinathan will join me in politics.”
That was it. No slogans dressed up around it. No careful phrasing for the cameras. The crowd went quiet first, then loud. Sabarinathan broke down. Vijay steadied him. Rajendran stood nearby, equally overwhelmed. Someone caught all of it on camera, and the clip spread because it felt real, which in Indian politics, is rarer than it should be.
Vijay had been saying, in various ways, that he wanted to build a party of ordinary people rather than political royalty. This was not a press release about that idea. This was the idea, on a stage, in real time.
The Numbers on Counting Day
After 10 rounds of counting in Virugambakkam, Sabarinathan was sitting at 32,428 votes, ahead by close to 10,000 votes over the DMK’s Prabhakar Raja. Each fresh round was pushing his lead further, not closing it.
The clip from that announcement event started circulating again almost immediately. Because now there was a second act to it.
The boy who cried on stage was pulling away in the count. His father’s 15 years behind the wheel were somehow part of that lead. People on X were not being subtle about it. One widely shared post put it plainly: Vijay gave an MLA ticket to his car driver’s son, and now he is winning.
The Bigger Picture TVK Just Drew
Sabarinathan is in one seat. But what TVK did across Tamil Nadu on Monday is something else entirely.
The party was leading in over 100 seats as trends came in, making it the single largest force in a state that has been split between the DMK and the AIADMK for longer than most of its voters have been alive. That is not a small thing. Tamil Nadu’s political structure does not bend easily. It broke open on Monday.
TVK went into this election positioning itself as a genuine third option, not a spoiler or a protest vote, but an alternative. The campaign reached young voters, urban voters, and people who had grown exhausted with the same two parties rotating power and blame for decades. That pitch landed. The numbers say so.
That said, leading in 100 seats is not the same as forming a government. The majority mark sits at 118 in a 234-member assembly, and TVK’s current numbers leave it short. Alliance conversations, some of which were already attempted and abandoned before the election, will likely restart now with very different leverage on both sides. The AIADMK is one name being mentioned. Where that goes is anyone’s guess at this point.
Why This Story Will Not Leave the Conversation
Indian politics runs on inheritance. Surnames open doors that talent alone cannot. Everyone knows this. Everyone has quietly accepted it as the operating reality of how things work, whether in Tamil Nadu or anywhere else in the country.
What Vijay did with the Sabarinathan announcement did not dismantle that reality. One seat does not dismantle anything. But it said something clearly, in front of a crowd and a camera, about what kind of party he wanted TVK to be. And then, on counting day, the voters in Virugambakkam said something back.
There are still hard questions ahead. Sabarinathan, if he wins this seat, walks into the assembly as a first-time legislator from a party that may or may not have a clear path to power. Virugambakkam has real problems: infrastructure, civic access, employment, all the ordinary but urgent things that do not make for emotional viral videos but do make for a functional life. A crying moment on a stage is not a governance plan.
Still. A 32-year-old from a working-class family in Chennai is set to become an MLA because a film star trusted his father enough to trust him. That is nothing. In a country where political access is quietly rationed by family, money, and the right last name, that is actually quite a lot.
For now, the video keeps playing with a young man in tears. A father watching. A crowd that did not know what to do with its feelings, and then decided to cheer.
Fifteen years of driving someone else to their destination. And then this.
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- Ananya Sharma
- Ananya Sharma
- Ananya Sharma
- Ananya Sharma
- Arun Upadhayay
- Arun Upadhayay
- Arun Upadhayay
- Arun Upadhayay
