Kamaraj was the associate editor at Nakkheeran news magazine in 1999 when forest brigand Veerappan kidnapped Kannada film actor Rajkumar.
“He was introduced to Karunanidhi by senior journalist A Kamaraj from Nakkheeran,” said “Savukku” Shankar, who claimed he had “personally verified” this, though Kamaraj denied the allegation to Newslaundry. Karunanidhi lived according to the Dravidian principles of atheism and rationality, critical of seers and saints, but Vasudev seemed to be the exception to this rule. In 2006, M Karunanidhi, the head of the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, was chief minister of Tamil Nadu. And three years after his column began, he was also building a political bank of support. His reputation as a thoughtful, spiritual advisor to Vikatan’s lakhs of readers was established. In September 2007, he launched a monthly magazine called Kaattu Poo, whose readership mainly comprised his followers. “It’s how Jaggi Vasudev realised that media exposure would bring him popularity.”Īnd Vasudev was quick to capitalise on it. And that’s how the public began noticing Vasudev,” said Achimuthu Shankar, a government employee turned whistleblower who’s now more famous as “Savukku” Shankar. “People loved ‘Manase Relax Please’, so they also read ‘Athainaikkum Aasaipadu’. Sukhabodhananda’s column might have generated interest in the idea of spiritual writing for Vikatan’s readers, but the traction Vasudev’s writings got was all his own doing. The writer of Vikatan’s second spiritual series, this time titled “Athanaikkum Aasaipadu”, or the desire for everything, was a man who already had a staunch group of followers but was yet to attain the national, and international, prominence that he has today. Spiritual advice was clearly good for business, and why wouldn’t a magazine want to cash in on it?
The column, titled “Manase Relax Please”, or "mind, relax please", was authored first in 1997 and then again in 2003 by Swami Sukhabodhananda, and did so well that Vikatan commissioned the column again in 2004, this time helmed by a little-known “guru”. Vikatan was a big name in the world of Tamil news and reporting – and still is, in terms of its reach and circulation – so the decision to hand over precious column space to a so-called “guru” raised a few eyebrows.īut the decision paid off. In 1997, a spiritual leader started a column in Ananda Vikatan, a weekly Tamil magazine published out of Chennai.
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