Rajnikanth - Magic

You can be Hindu, you can be Muslim. You can be Tamil and you can be from somewhere else. You can be a cinema connoisseur or you could be a grindhouse goon. You could be straight, and you could be gay. But the one thing you could not be immune to is the magic of Rajnikanth.

Whether you smoke or not, you cannot be but amazed by the cigarette flip to the mouth. No matter how much you might abhor even the idea of smoking, with its malodorous stench or its unhealthy implications, touch your heart and tell me that if a cigarette has been flipped by Rajnikanth, your heart has not fluttered a teeny bit. If it hasn't, then its made of stone. There was a time in India, not 15 years ago, when smoking was considered the domain of the male, a cool and and the same time, disgusting thing, that no girl would even try, because it was "bad." Those days are long gone thanks to globalization. But I am not here to judge the advancement or degeneration of culture. I am merely stating that even then, those girls swooned for Rajni's style. Not so much for the cigarette, you see, but what it meant. The style.

And another thing. This may be a personal opinion or one shared by the masses. I don't know. I am attracted to Rajni. But judging by the whistles and the milk coronations, I would tend to believe that I am not alone in this total gayification whenever Thalaivar (leader - please not in the political sense) comes on screen.  Rajnikanth could be in the hottest song with the most beautiful heroine in the world - why it could be Angelina Jolie morphed with Aishwarya Rai along with the physical attributes of Venus, and all I would still see is Rajnikanth's stilted dance movements appreciating every second, how much our God has mastered the hours of input by a Michael Jacksonesque coreographer. I would little realize that the heroine is wearing the most revealing outfit; and I would like one self respecting male audience member to describe to me even with the most minimal detail, the color of her dress. And by the way, I would like anyone who reads this blog to touch their heart and tell me that i am not voicing their own opinion, my personal public image be damned.

This is not to say that the heroine in a Rajni movie is just eye candy. Far from it. In recent history, every Rajni film has been driven by a strong feminine character, and I am very thankful for that. Unlike other superstars, our REAL superstar has chosen to go in a direction that is new for Tamil cinema. To explore and utilize the power of the female lead. Straight from Muthu, where a love triangle between the always ephemeral Rajni and the ever so dung like Sarath Babu fought for the affections of a clearly Malayali Meena, to Padayappa, where the Neelambari character all but stole the show but for the superlative presence of the rural Churchill (he of the persistent cheroot), and to Endhiran just recently, when the female drove even a robot to distraction, (although, when you are dealing with an international beauty queen, nominal performance tolerances even from nickel bolts must be expected) it has been his way for quite sometime.

If you though I am forgetting Chandramuhkhi on that list, haha, think again. While Jyothika was a very strong female antagonist, P. Vasu is a terrible director. So no matter how good her characterization was in that film, and no matter how central strong female lead was to the development of that story, a flashlight beam played across Rajni's eyes to indicate the brilliance of some unnamed accomplishment is sloppy direction, so that movie is banned... forever! P. Vasu is dead to me!!!


Is it the man's humility then? There are some who are humble because they know they're not good enough. There are yet other, of the worse second kind, who know they make the cut, and yet fish for accolades. Rajni seems to be someone who's got this balance down pat. Why, every time you tell me he's too humble, I can show you Kamal Hassan sitting beside him, and when you have Brahma sitting next to you, you'd be pretty much asking for it if you said that you designed the human genome. And just about when you are about to tell me that he's just showboarding, he comes up with something like this... "Naan yaana illinga, kuthirai" (I am not an elephant, but a horse) stating that he knows exactly where he stands. Also, please name one superstar today with a bald head who's not afraid to show its phrenology to the masses (and if you can't get that reference to the dead science, then you were probably born around the same time he lost his hair). That's more than humility. That's willful abandon, the elder cousin of Mr. H.

He's not a perfect human being. No one is. Everyone knows about his rancid early days, about his addictions and his womanizing and his tantrums amd his traumas. But the thing that sets him apart is that demigods tend to be just that. They obfuscate the demi and promulgate the god. A god hides nothing. The purpose of a demigod is for you to respect him no matter what he may be. That is why Gaddafi had to be a general although he holds no military rank by right. A god on the other hand exists solely to teach you right from wrong. That is whay Gatothgaja is not in the Mahabaratha to just tell you that Bheema had another wife. He is there to tell, albeit metaphorically, to elicit that polygamy isn't a good thing (my sincere view, and if anybody objects, take it up him when your number comes up). God is an open book for us to learn from. Now, I am not claiming that Rajni is a god. But I am saying that to put the qualifier "demi-" in front of it if you are going to worship him as a god is a disservice to him.

One thing he said in his 12-12-12 birthday address was revealing, and truly shocking to me, as someone who's grown up with the somersaulting cigarettes. He said - paraphrased and translated - I am saying from personal painful experience, if you are a true fan, stop smoking. You know, he may be not be god. Hell, he may not even be the most perfect man to have lived. But, hell, he is the Thalaivar. The only one.