3 min readHyderabadMay 6, 2026 12:31 PM IST
The morning after Tamil Nadu rewrote its political map, everyone had a theory on how Vijay succeeded with a historic lead. However, Shriya Saran remembered an afternoon on a film set when it was 45 degrees outside and Vijay’s fans had shown up hoping for a glimpse of him.
“This was the time when I was shooting with Vijay. It was very hot. It was like 45 degrees and you cannot stand outside. It was in the month of April. His fans had come to visit him, to click photos with him, and this man stood outside his van in the heat so that people could click photos with him,” Shriya explained in an conversation with NDTV.
There is nothing complicated about that image. A film star on a working shoot day, stepping out of the only cool space available to him on a sweltering April afternoon, because people had travelled to see him and he did not want to let them down.
But people remember. That, Shriya says, is the part that political analysts tend to miss when they try to explain Vijay’s rise. “That’s the kind of love he gives back to people who have come all the way for a glimpse of him,” she said. “He will go out of his way to make it a special day for them.”
What Tamil Nadu was watching
Vijay launched TVK on February 2, 2024, stepping away from a film career that had made him one of Tamil cinema’s most bankable stars for over three decades. The move was met with curiosity and scepticism in equal measure.
However, years before TVK existed, Vijay had been showing up. At charitable causes, at community events, in moments of public need. His fan associations, which numbered in the tens of thousands across the state, had long operated less like entertainment clubs and more like civic organisations, running blood donation drives, distributing relief during floods, taking on the kind of local work that rarely attracts cameras or credit. Shriya says Tamil Nadu’s voters were paying attention to all of it.
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According to her, Tamil Nadu’s voters did not wake up on election day and decide to trust a film star on a whim. They had been watching him for years, not just on screen but in the spaces in between, at causes he showed up for, in the effort he put in when nothing was being asked of him and no election was on the horizon.
“The youth, the people in Tamil Nadu, they have been following his journey,” she said. “All the hard work he’s been doing, they know it. They have respect and love for him for that.”
She also points to something that goes beyond warmth and accessibility. “He is a great orator. When he gives a speech, the way he moves his eyes, his charisma, you believe in him. He has given love, and people see that effort, respect it and love it. And rightly so,” she said. “I think he will bring in the change.”
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