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There is no straight path from the box office to the ballot box, not even in Tamil Nadu. Today it is exactly 200 years since Napoleon was narrowly defeated at the Battle of Waterloo by the combined armies of the British and the Prussians. The challenge for Vijay, or any other new entrant, would be to convince voters that they have the political vision and stamina to take on the Dravidian behemoths in elections and stay the course. MGR was successful because he, over the years, carefully plotted his political entry by using cinema as a medium for messaging and the DMK platform to claim an ideological lineage. It is clear that mere box-office pull is not enough to win over voters, and keep them there. But the DMDK is today a shell of what it was a decade ago. That performance helped him to manipulate electoral alliances and claim seats disproportionate to his influence. He polled nearly 10 per cent votes in the 2006 assembly elections, a year after forming the DMDK. The exception is Vijayakanth, who set himself up as a Dravidian alternative to the DMK and AIADMK. Other stars rode with established political groups (Napoleon, Khushboo) or leaned on caste/community support (Sarath Kumar, Karthik). Haasan, who rivalled Rajinikanth in fan base in the 1980s, turned a niche actor-director in the 1990s and has fewer fans to work for him. Rajinikanth had hoped to do the same but he withdrew from politics even before entering the electoral fray. In the 1970s, MGR built the AIADMK by turning his fans into party cadres. Vijay, too, is using his fan base to test the political waters - it was All India Thalapathy Vijay Makkal Iyakkam, the Vijay fans’ association, that fielded the candidates in the local polls.