Admiration is the one feeling no one can have enough of. It is the time where one person has to bow down and lower himself to praise the object of his admiration. As I write this sentence, I hope that I have conjured up a beautiful painting in the mind of you, the reader and then I can consider my job done. There is no shortage of words/images/symbols to admire someone and that is the most beautiful part of admiring. There are loopholes to this approach because sometimes we end up admiring the wrong thing or the wrong person only because they conform to an image in our mind, which can be easily falsified as well but we in a fit of stubbornness don’t do so, and ironically enough, this is a very common theme in many artistic and literature works.
Since I like writing about the topic of movies, I find this article comes very naturally to me and admiration is a building block of the movie world else no movie would ever be called a hit, no actor a star. And a particularly hysterical, almost manic level of admiration for this essentially ephemeral world is seen in South Indian cinema and over the years this exalted position has been handed over to MGR, Jayalalithaa, Sivaji Ganesan and now currently Rajinikanth, also known as Thailaiva. He is 5’9 but the way 20 feet and above billboards are erected for his new movies, even a temple has been built for him and if rumors are to be believed, twenty thousand gallons of milk are spent for him, as if he were not an actor but a god descended from the heavens.
Jailer, his recent movie has earned 450 crores in a week, a worldwide record and a south indian one as well, which does not leave anything further for me to say. Just the idea that Rajinikanth has starred in a movie, even if he does not have a protagonist role will make the movie hit, this a tried and tested formula. And what happens when he is the titular lead? You can see for yourself in this paragraph.
This is no longer mere adulatory writing, this is verified by my experience. I visited Chennai in 2016 and when I asked directions to Poes Garden just to look at this actor’s house, 10 people gave me directions and fought over the shortest directions. I later on went and braved a minor crowd to ask the guard if the legend was at home and he wasn’t, but that day the teenage Tejaswi wizened. He finally understood the importance of fortune from the one who clearly embodies it.