Rajinikanth is best for jokes, not politics
"We have no Pongal and no Deepavali. Our Thailaiva's movie release dates are our Pongal, Deepavali, New Year, Christmas, Eid, Navratri, everything."
It was the day before tickets were to go on sale for Chandramukhi, in early 2005. The speaker was a rickshaw puller, who had arrived with a tarpaulin sheet, to camp overnight outside a cinema hall. I was a rookie journalist, covering the Rajinikanth hysteria.
Nearly a decade later, more than 3,000 fans crowded into the venue of the audio release for Rajinikanth's newest offering, Lingaa, this Sunday. It has been more than four years since his last in-the-flesh film, Robot/Enthiran was released. In the interim, the shoddy Kochadaiiyaan (2014), his first animated film, became a box-office debacle. Despite the fact that Rajinikanth had been hospitalised several times in the preceding year, even his crazed fans couldn't salvage the film's box office performance. Was Rajinikanth's appeal waning?
At the time, I had written that the 63-year-old actor perhaps has one last in-the-flesh film left in him.
In a state which has only had chief ministers from the film industry for nearly half a century, it would make sense for Rajinikanth to segue from acting into politics. Jayalalithaa's conviction in the disproportionate assets case has created possibilities on which the "superstar" may capitalise, if he were to take the plunge.
Rajinikanth has often been asked about his plans to enter politics. He has traditionally evaded them, usually with some form of humble-brag. However, at the audio release function, when he was urged to run for chief minister in 2016 - by a film director who, incidentally, ceded his copyright over the title "Lingaa" so that Rajinikanth could use the name for his film - he said, "I am not afraid of politics, but I am wary. I don't know where my path will take me, but if it leads me there and if god wants me to do it, then I will strive to do good for people."
Vairamuthu, a well-known Tamil film lyricist, said, "No one can push him to enter politics, but when he decides to do it, no one can stop him."
If one didn't know better, one would think the questions and comments were orchestrated.
Ever since Rajinikanth met Narendra Modi during his campaign in Tamil Nadu, in the lead-up to the General Election, there has been increasing speculation over his impending entry into politics, fuelled by his meeting with the BJP state president. The rest of India woke up to Rajinikanth when he started acting with Bollywood heroines - Aishwarya Rai, Deepika Padukone, and now Sonakshi Sinha - and began to wonder what the secret of his appeal is. We, down south, have been trying to figure it out for two and a half decades.
It is, perhaps, a combination of Rajinikanth's marketing acumen and his dreamlike rags-to-riches story. Actors-turned-politicians such as MG Ramachandran - who was Jayalalithaa's mentor - and Vijayakanth have used their films as campaign vehicles, playing characters who were patriots and reformers and spokespeople for the oppressed. DMK patriarch Karunanidhi used to be a film writer, whose scripts contained heavy overtones of Dravida politics. But Rajinikanth's charms are not confined to his screen roles. He is a school dropout, whose family was so poor that he devoted most of his teens to working menial jobs by day and acting in plays by night. His real-life transformation from bus conductor to superstar makes a more dramatic story than the most escapist of his films.
Incredibly, Rajinikanth has managed to actively foster the "superstar" epithet - he starred in a film with a signature song that reinforced the sobriquet - even while having his humility documented by camera crews who follow him on barefoot Himalayan pilgrimages. His family organised a festival celebrating his 25th year in cinema. The producers of Chandramukhi ensured that the film ran for 890 days in a theatre owned by them, playing to empty halls towards the end, just so that it would break a record for the longest-running Tamil film.
If the actor were to run for office, his popularity and PR skills could see a man with no administrative experience or political know-how take over the state that made him a superstar.
He's making the right noises. But will the momentum of the film be enough to carry him through to 2016? Or will he decide that Tamil Nadu has learnt to separate the man from the make-believe, and refuse to throw his hat in the ring?
Perhaps it would be best for Rajinikanth to bow out of his career, leaving behind a legacy of Chuck Norris style jokes, and a tradition of casting unattractive men in lead roles for Tamil films.