The Lion’s roar: Inside the Tamil show turning startups into household names
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Kannan Hari walked onto the Startup Singam set carrying karupatti—palm jaggery—made from the palmyra, the state tree of Tamil Nadu. He runs Palm Era, a palm jaggery and natural sweeteners brand.
Startup Singam is a Tamil pitch show on Star Vijay (Vijay TV), also streaming on JioHotstar. The show’s title track slips an instruction into the chorus: “To reach the dream, knock on the door". Its premise is that the knock can be in Tamil—but it still opens the door to people who speak in English, in metros.
Kannan, an electronics and instrumentation engineering graduate (class of 2008), spent almost 15 years in IT before quitting on 18 May 2025, when his monthly salary was about ₹5 lakh. In 2021, back home for a temple festival in Nambiyanvilai village, in Tirunelveli district, he watched about 30 palm trees being cut down in bulk. He’d been seeing palms cut since childhood.
This time, he stopped and asked why. The farmer was afraid of what the fruit attracted. Fallen fruit drew wild pigs; the pigs destroyed the peanut crop next door.
“My concern is only the palm fruit," the farmer told him. Harvest it—eat it as an ice apple, tap the tree for neera—just keep the fruit from bringing the pigs. Then, he made an offer: Kannan could access roughly 200 trees for free, because the farmer was losing more than he was gaining.
Palm Era’s innovation was not flashy. It was practical. Palm jaggery clumps, sweats, unlike white sugar.
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