Talk of the town

WHAT'S THE latest in cricket-driven hairstyle? The guru of the closest summer-cut this season is none other than Colin `Funky' Miller, the man on the wrong side of the mid-thirties.

Miller landed in India with hair 2 mm long and was reportedly selling his style to the team. Mat Hayden `followed' the guru right from Mumbai, but then the following did not grow.

That was till the team landed in Chennai. The extremely hot and humid weather saw quite a few line-up in front of Funky's room for a Miller-cut.

``There is a queue outside his room,'' Glen McGrath said the other evening at the Taj. ``I saw Shane Warne there. There was Slater too. His style seems to be the in thing,'' he added.

True, there was lot of mutual admiration for the new style at the MAC stadium.

McGrath, who sounds conservative, thinks that Miller is unusual. ``In one test when he coloured his hair blue, he quite shocked the batsman as he handed over his hat to the umpire,'' he remembers. ``No, I don't think I can ever do something like that. My wife would not let me into the house,'' he adds.

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THAT VERY attractive jingle that matches the very non-Dravidian ad of a very Dravidian party - heard that? The two-minute `Tamizha Tamizha' advertisement on Sun TV has indeed got viewers watching for the next two minutes and 15 seconds. Next, they begin wondering who was behind the lens.

Erstwhile movie maker, G. B. Vijay, was the man who accomplished this mission impossible in 10 days. After dishing out slickly- shot thrillers, memorable among them being, `Nalaya Seithi' and `Kalaignan', Vijay joined the Rajiv Menon coterie, jumping onto the ad bandwagon five years ago. A sidelight: perhaps something he's not SO famous for, Vijay did the dialogue for Minsara Kanavu.

At present, his claim to fame is the commercial that is running on Sun. His ad film firm `Sculptors' was asked to shoot the short and complete it within 15 days - a seemingly impossible task that, however, came with a lot of freedom. A whirlwind tour of the State - stretching quite lyrically from Kanyakumari in the south, right up to the metro followed. The one line phrase that Vijay came up with rings clearly now - `Tamizha Tamizha'.

Paul Jacob composed the haunting music score while Thiyaru penned the lyrics for this ad which was shot using three cameras and nearly 30,000 reels. Cleared without a murmur by Sun TV, except for a request to replace an image of the CM with a clearer image. And that is the long and the short of it.

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CANVASSING FOR their greater powers, women panchayat leaders recently met representatives of all political parties in the State. They were for a quid pro quo arrangement, promising to support the party if it did the same for their cause. After doing the rounds, the women were jolted by the newspaper headlines the next morning.

Most papers had carried stories stating that the women panchayat leaders had cast their lot with the AIADMK. Apparently newspaper offices had received a communication from the AIADMK that the women had met the party general secretary, Ms. Jayalalitha and would support the party if the demands were met.

The dailies promptly carried this, the women leaders said, and since other political parties did not send such a communique, it was left to them to clarify matters the next day.

By R. K. Radhakrishnan

and Ramya Kannan

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Section  : Southern States
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