Talk of the town

TIME TRAVEL through the melody route might after all be a great idea. `Kannadasan-Vairamuthu - Netrum Indrum', a music programme with a difference is to be held at Kamaraj Arangam on Sunday.

Each immortal song of the late Kannadasan will be followed by one penned by Vairamuthu for a similar mood, situation and subject. What is more, Vairamuthu will add a dash of his oratorical skills to the presentation. Event managers, Fast Forward, say S.P. Shailaja and SPB Charan and other singers will render over 35 songs of the two lyricists.

The idea is bring to the present generation, the way the music and the scenes on the silver screen have changed in situation and picturisation over a period from Kannadaan to Vairamuthu.

Raguraj Chakravarthy will conduct the orchestra. For fans, they get the best of both worlds.

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HE IS the latest IAS officer put on ``wait''. And, for a change, he is waiting in Delhi, with no posting.

The senior bureaucrat, Mr. Om Kumar, was till recently the Resident Commissioner of Tamil Nadu in Delhi, has been eased out.

And, a political appointee, Dr. B.P. Rajan, has been posted as Special Representative of Tamil Nadu Government in Delhi by the present AIADMK regime.

But, the ``transferred'' officer, has nowhere to go to. No posting and no accomodation.

Mr. Om Kumar has been a ``victim'' of the previous DMK regime too.

In just one-and-a-half years after he was appointed as the TNEB chairman, he was shunted to an insignificant post in Chennai, and later sent to Delhi.

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THE DMK is one media-savvy party, from which others can take a lesson or two.

Each time the party supremo, Mr. Karunanidhi meets the press - regardless of how many journalists are present - a transcript of the session is sent to all agencies and most newspapers.

The press has found this arrangement useful since it means that no one `misses out' on anything that the former Chief Minister has spoken about. But there is one complaint though. For some reason all questions asked - and answered, even if in monosyllables - do not find their way into the transcribed copy. But some scribes say that something is better than nothing: They would rather have an `official' version of the interaction than none at all.

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TOUGH AGAINST villains and soft towards the downtrodden. That's the image tinseltown's heroes want to project on screen.

But actor Vijaykant likes a similar reputation off- screen too. The action hero has started a self-financing engineering college - one among the 63 new ones that have come up this year.

In a dramatic gesture, Vijaykant wrote to the Directorate of Technical Education, asking that all the seats in his college be declared `free'.

He did not want a `payment seat'.

A few more colleges followed suit, but that move can also be attributed to this year's glut in engineering seats.

A year or two ago, a Tamil newspaper carried a report on some meritorious students not being able to join B.E. courses due to poverty.

The hero contacted the paper and volunteered to help.

Amid a busy `shooting' day, he called the students to a film set and gave them the money to pursue their course. One of them got more than what he asked for. ``Keep it... just in case,'' the hero said helpfully.

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IN THE era of KBC, Crorepatis are thrown up every so often. Good news for insurance companies like LIC and their agents (though private insurance companies have come with better policies and bad news).

But this is about an agent himself who has insured his own life for the princely sum of Rs. one crore. LIC says Mr. M.R. Bhaarath is the first agent in the entire nation to have a policy on his own life for this sum.

The policy was handed over to a beaming Mr. Bhaarath of City Branch 10 by the LIC Chairman, Mr. G.N. Bajpai at the landmark building of the Corporation in the city.

Talking of crores, Mr. Bhaarath deals in crores every year. He did business worth Rs. seven crores and has announced an astounding Rs. 100 crores as his new business target for the current year.

By K. Ramachandran, R.K. Radhakrishnan and Radha Venkatesan

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