In Tamilnadu, without cinema background, no one can become a great politician. Why is it so?

it is because tamil p...

1. Unlike normal politicians who have to fight for people's attention all the time, actors have their full attention through their movies. Everybody who watches movies (and most people do) are so familiar with actors, and this familiarity goes a long way in connecting with people and making people trust them. 2. Actors with political aspirations and ideologies tend to pick movies through which they can espouse their ideologies. They also engineer their roles to be homogeneously positive and heroic in most of their movies. This image ends up seeping deeply into the consciousness of the people purely by repetition if not anything else. 3. Any political theorist would tell you how important appearance is for attracting the trust and attention of the masses. By appearance, I mean not only their looks but also their body language, their mannerisms, their speeches, their presence and charisma, etc. Most often the effects are less conscious than one would admit (i.e. most people might not believe that they chose a particular candidate simply because he was better looking, but this still happens). Actors succeed better than others in this respect since their profession is centered around these attributes. 4. There are no academic qualifications for politics, nor is there any fair parameter for judging who should or should not get into politics. So it is unfair to say that actors should not be in politics. It is not as if the other politicians all got there starting from social service. Most politicians used to be henchmen and minions of earlier politicians, if not their relatives. In these circumstances, actors seem better since at the very least they earned an honest livelihood in the competitive cinema industry and succeeded in generating goodwill from the people. Per se we cannot judge whether an actor leading a government is good or bad. There is no compelling reason to either dismiss or extol actors with political ambitions. There have been actor-turned-politicians who have done well and are still remembered fondly, and there are those who are disliked for lousy and corrupt activities in power.

The cinema-politics nexus in TN started off in the late 1960s when MGR and Karunanidhi were ruling TN. MGR specifically, used his movies as a vehicle to get into politics in a big way.  MGR and Karunanidhi were in the same party (DMK) until around 1973. Due to some internal politics, DMK expelled MGR and he started off ADMK. After MGR's death, Jayalalitha took over the mantle and the rest is history.