There’s a popular Tamil movie, Anniyan (Stranger), which released in 2005. Allow this writer to indulge in a little neologism at the outset – the ‘Millennial Tamil’ – a generic term to define the post-2000 pop culture-fed Tamil youth. Like all generics, this is bound to have its exceptions.

Coming back to Anniyan, the movie perhaps symbolises the Millennial Tamil psyche more aptly than any other, in more ways than one. In the film, the protagonist is a weak, unmanly, stickler-for-rules Brahmin lawyer (ah, the good old Brahmin weakling stereotype) who gets enraged at the slightest hint of apathy. He works his anger up to a lather and as a good consumer rights lawyer should, drags sundry offenders to court. But the offenders always get away by hook or crook (the ‘system’ is always evil). The timid Brahmin lawyer is but an impotent twig – how can he fight a well-oiled system where there are leeches at every twist and turn?

In comes a grim-reaper based character called ‘Anniyan’. He is another personality that springs forth from the protagonist who’s a multiple personality disorder patient. All the apathy that the weak, rules-following lawyer fails to address, Anniyan addresses by dispensing punishments prescribed in the Garuda Purana to the corrupt and debauched. While some offenders would be fried in oil, some others would be devoured by leeches. Unlike the impotent lawyer, Anniyan doesn’t have patience for a crooked justice system; he is Justice incarnate.

This simplistic plot that tries hard to come across as a sophisticated ‘psychological thriller’ is a good metaphor for the Millennial Tamil and the assorted complexes that reside in him. The Millennial Tamil sees decadence, negligence and corruption devour everything around him while he watches on helplessly. He is convinced that almost everyone in positions of power is part of a grand conspiracy that only seeks to deepen this decadence.

Being brought up on a staple diet of larger-than-life heroes who, in borderline communist archetypal roles, always take on the corrupt rich and deliver instant justice to the poor, the Millennial Tamil yearns for an Anniyan, in fact he wishes he can be one himself. Now, social networks have given him a shot at it.

Dravidianist politics, through its purging from the public sphere of all that’s sacral, left behind a gaping hole, a sort of nihilism that was waiting to find a purpose. Where there’s such a vacuum, cynics cannot be far behind. A plethora of forces like evangelists, Leftists, Dravidianists and lately even Islamists joined hands to fill this vacuum with a deadly cocktail of borderline racist, anti-Hindu, neo-Luddite, obsessively conspiratorial, victim-victor complex.

They drive the Millennial Tamil, they give him a purpose and these purposes are fulfilling ones in themselves. At times, the fight is to save Jallikattu from the evil ‘Aryan’ courts and PETA, and at other times it is the noble quest of erasing Hindi alphabets from national highway milestones – all high-minded pursuits that fight a good fight against the Brahminical Indian government.

The latest such episode that gathered eyeballs was the farmer protest at Jantar Mantar. His movies have taught the Millennial Tamil that farmers are always right. This message was reinforced when some actors from the Tamil industry showed up at the protest site . So, it is obvious that the Millennial Tamil sees the whole world starting from neighbouring Karnataka to Delhi’s Modi and even America’s Trump as conspirators against the Tamil farmer.

Questions like whether agriculture is a state subject or something for Narendra Modi to look at, do not matter. Facebook memes cannot be bothered about mere technicalities once Modi has been marked as the target. Cynical manipulators had already managed to turn the Jallikattu protest into an anti-Modi event towards its end. They conveniently did not pass the memo to the protesters that said that the Modi government had issued a pro-Jallikattu ordinance earlier which was stayed by the Supreme Court.