On Monday morning, as the 17th Tamil Nadu Assembly convened for the first time, Udhayanidhi Stalin, walked into a chamber that suddenly looked unfamiliar even to the leaders who once controlled it. Across the aisle sat Chief Minister C Joseph Vijay in a suit. Behind Vijay, 51, sat a legion of the TVK’s young, first-time MLAs: political debutants, booth workers, digital creators, fan club organisers, meme-makers, and ex-YouTubers, many of them under 40 and apparently more comfortable with Instagram algorithms than the Assembly conventions. Led by Vijay, they have just broken six decades of the Dravidian majors’ dominance. On the other side was the old order, compressed together for the first time, with the legislators of the arch rivals DMK and AIADMK – parties that spent half a century taking on each other – sitting together in the newly elected House. The sight was stark. Tamil Nadu politics has always operated like a rotating inheritance system: one Dravidian giant ruled, the other one sat in the Opposition. Now both parties have been pushed together into …