GENRE :: RAJNI


You may not a get word of Tamil, you may hate the autowallahs who pretend to not get a word of Hindi that you are yelling, you may not even bother about the people blabbering around you in some alien language leave aside making an serious effort to find what "entraa" meant....(though one wouldn't mind decorating the walls with posters of Asin and Shreya) ; but mark my words, if you are marooned somewhere in South India longing to stay away from sambhar and rasam, there is one thing you cannot surely do - AVOID RAJNI.

I have been staying in Chennai for the past two years and despite all my sincere efforts I have not been able to prevent Rajni from getting into system. Sigmund Freud remarked, "The mind absorbs only what it wants as its appetite "; but his quote falls to flat ears when it comes to Rajni and South India. I have not watched a single Rajni movie and I even avoided the screening of "Chandramukhi" in my institute (I remember the day. It was like Diwali being celebrated all over again. The countdown had begun the day the announcement was made and on the eve of screening people were behaving as if ATLANTIS was supposed to be launched. The anticipation, the craze, the excitement........ I wish, I could put it in paper.
The OAT where the movie was being screened was jam packed(IT IS THE UNDERSTATEMENT OF THE DECADE). I believe more people attended it than the Shanker-Ehsaan-Loy concert. I avoided going to the theater on the pretext that I wouldn't get the language.[Well.... If you would believe my southie friend, one-third of the theater was filled with people who didn't get the language and supposedly half the crowd go to watch Rajni movies not because they care for the script or dialogues but exclusively for Rajni's mere presence]. At this point I must admit that my real reason of avoiding the screening was because the racist in me was not ready to accept a South Indian idol. My only previous memoirs of Rajni were that of a pot bellied, supernatural hero who defied Newton's laws of Physics. He could kill two goons with one bullet by merely using a blade to bifurcate the speeding bullets. If he was separated from the antagonist by a wall, he would toss one gun up into the air and shoot at it with another when the former attained its peak. The bullet from the latter would cause the trigger motion in the first one killing of the predator on the other side of the wall.

That was about Chandramukhi and the ignorant me before I was marooned in South India. Times have changed. Its "Shivaji" now. But Rajni-mania has not changed. Its the same madness in his fan following, the same craze and the same demi-god treatment. I didnt get it then, I still dont get it. I dont even know if his movies are romances, comedies, action or for that matter parallel cinema. I asked a close friend of mine, who actually missed on an evening with his ex-girl friend because he had to watch 'Shivaji', as to what genre 'Shivaji' belonged. To my amazement, he asserted that you couldn't characterize Rajni's movies. Characterizing into one particular mould meant that you are claiming that Rajni was not effective in the other mould.

In his words, " Genre :: Rajni. It's a Rajni movie macha... "