Stalin’s ‘get sixteen’ new ‘gimme five!’?

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, especially when it involves being bent out of shape in translation. Since Monday, M K Stalin picked up traction among professional pouncers and outgoing outragers when he, at a mass wedding ceremony at Marundeeswarar Temple in Chennai, told the 31 happy couples while blessing them to have ’16 children’. Each. Apparently, this was the Tamil Nadu CM’s bid to increase the population of the state substantially to counter the upcoming delimitation exercise to be held by 2026.

Problem is, headline-grabbing as Stalin’s suggestion may be, what he said wasn’t really to get people to breed like rabbits. What he said was, ‘Pathinarum petru peru vazhvu vazhga,’ which Google Translate tells us means, ‘Get sixteen and live a great life.’ Now the problem is, in Tamil, ‘petru’ means ‘give birth to’, like the English word, ‘beget’. But Stalin was quoting the Tamil saying attributed to 15th c. poet Kalamega Pulavar, which when contextualised means ‘Lead a great life by acquiring 16 (kinds of wealth)’. ’16 kinds of wealth’, of course, makes a better blessing than headlines. Coupled with the earlier comment to have more kids by neighbouring CM, N Chandrababu Naidu, to balance the old-young demographics, Stalin, too, is charged of being anti-Malthusian. But hang on, was his statement a double-entendre?