But many believe that Dayanidhi Maran is in the wrong party. The Congress fits into his profile of a businessman-politician. “The Maran brothers are too big to be confined to Tamil Nadu,” says an analyst. " The difference between Sun and Kalaignar TV is: Sun will survive as a professional entity even if the Marans don’t survive politically whereas the same cannot be said of Kalaignar TV.” Considering that starting with AIADMK chief Jayalalitha, to CPI and CPIM leaders, there’s a clamour for Kalaignar TV’s licence to be revoked, its days might be numbered. May 13 will tell.
The Gold Standard
IIT Madras usually makes news because of excellence in academics, its festival (Sarang) or some innovation by a student or department. But this time it has made it to the press because of controversial reasons after its 1,500 employees including faculty were given gold coins (two grams for every years of service) as a “Golden Jubilee Souvenir”, though the golden jubilee was two years ago.
A section of the faculty wonder how the director, M S Ananth, played Santa (the coins cost Rs one crore) when IIT-M does not have enough funds to even pay salaries. An annoyed Ananth sent an email out saying, “Individual faculty have the choice of either accepting the souvenir, declining the same or accepting it and donating it to whatever cause they see fit.” He justified the largesse (paid for by IIT’s corpus fund) saying IIT Kharagpur and Bombay had similarly honoured their employees when they turned 50. To the other contention that a open tender was not floated to procure the gold coins, Ananth says, “All procedures were followed and nationalised banks were contacted for the supply of the souvenirs.”
But a faculty member says that “Corpus funds were created for specific purposes along with rules for inflow as well as outflow of funds. The corpus funds were generated from industrial consultancy and sponsored projects using infrastructure, human resources and facilities that have been created in IIT with HRD Ministry funds.” And that means that even if the Board approves, the funds cannot be used any which way. Incidentally, the corpus at IIT-M has been created from funds transferred as a loan to build the IIT Research Park and for executing the second phase of the flagship National Programme on Technology Enhanced Learning.
Tailpiece
“We’ve named her Tanmaya,” says Udayanidhi Stalin, about the daughter his wife Krutika delivered recently. Udayanidhi, the producer of Red Giant Movies, who will turn actor with Oru Kal Oru Kannadi soon, says, “The name was selected by my son and her elder brother, Inba.” No gold ring for little Tanmaya for sure. Her grandfather Stalin had made the rule that only babies given Tamil names would get a gold ring!