CHENNAI: “You will be alright soon. You have to be positive in such times. It happens to everyone,” Jayalalithaa had said when she met her decades-old friend Cho S Ramaswamy in April last year at the Apollo Hospitals. And by a twist of destiny, both died in the same hospital a year later.
It would be no exaggeration to say that the friendship between the Tughlak editor Cho S Ramaswamy and Chief Minister J Jayalalithaa lasted a lifetime. It is said that Cho, who was admitted in a ward next to Jayalalithaa in the Apollo Hospitals, passed away without knowing that his friend had left before him.
Jayalalithaa and Cho became friends when Cho was acting in plays staged by YG Parthasarathy in the early 1960s.
Jayalalithaa was just seven or eight years old and she used to accompany her mother. A few years later, Jaya also joined the YGP troupe. In one of the English dramas – The Whole Truth –, Cho took the villain’s role and he had to kill the character enacted by Jayalalithaa.
Jayalalithaa, in her lifetime, had bowed only before a very few. When she turned 60 in 2008, she visited Cho’s home and got the blessings of Cho and his wife. She also visited a few other senior persons, including the late actor MN Nambiyar and took his blessings.
During her first tenure as Chief Minister between 1991-96, Cho went against Jayalalithaa. However, Cho hailed Jayalalithaa as the Opposition leader and opposed the DMK government during 2006-2011.
At the end of her 2011-16 tenure as Chief Minister, when asked whether he did not find any fault with her government, Cho replied, “There are some issues. But this is not the time to speak about those.”