A day after Tamil Nadu Chief Minister C Joseph Vijay declared during his swearing-in speech that he “knew hunger” and came from humble beginnings, journalist and novelist Manu Joseph publicly challenged the narrative, accusing the actor-turned-politician of falsely projecting poverty.
Vijay, who became the first chief minister since 1962 outside the DMK-AIADMK duopoly, had used his inaugural address to position himself as someone who understood deprivation firsthand. Speaking before a massive gathering in Chennai, he said he was not born into privilege or a “royal family,” but was instead the son of an aspiring assistant director who had experienced hardship and hunger.
However, journalist, novelist and screenwriter Manu Joseph, writing in Mint and later posting on X, disputed those claims directly, saying he had studied with Vijay in the third standard at Loyola School and remembered him as a wealthy child from an influential film family.
Joseph described Vijay as someone who stood out among classmates because of his affluence and background. He recalled seeing Vijay at church wearing clothes that appeared “too fancy” for ordinary students and accompanied by a mother who looked “distinguished.” He also wrote that classmates understood Vijay to belong to an important and well-off family.
In his X post, Joseph was even more blunt. He stated that Vijay’s claim about growing up in poverty was “bullshit” because Vijay had studied at Loyola School and came from a filmmaker’s family. Joseph acknowledged that Vijay’s father may have gone through temporary financial struggles, as many in the film industry do, but argued that such phases were not comparable to the kind of structural poverty faced by ordinary Tamil families.
In his first speech as Tamil Nadu chief minister, Vijay said that he grew up in poverty, and that he even knows what hunger is. It’s bullshit because he was my classmate in the third standard in Loyola School.
His father was a filmmaker who set up his son for a career in films.…— Manu Joseph (@manujosephsan) May 11, 2026
Joseph further wrote that Vijay’s rise in cinema was heavily aided by his privileged starting point. According to him, Vijay’s father, filmmaker SA Chandrasekhar, had already planned and built a path for his son’s film career. He argued that Vijay’s success represented the advantage of a “head-start,” not the story of someone who rose from deep deprivation.
He contrasted Vijay’s background with that of many of their former classmates, whom he described as children from modest and even illiterate households struggling through school without guidance or privilege. Joseph wrote that several classmates succeeded despite severe odds, unlike Vijay, who had access to opportunities unavailable to most aspiring actors.
Joseph’s intervention has drawn attention because it directly attacks one of the core emotional themes of Vijay’s early political messaging that he understands the struggles of ordinary people because he personally lived through them.
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