Rajini is happy to play the glam hero in his films — but off-screen he seems to have no problem offering us his real persona, the wig be damned.
Again, my question: How come?
Baradwaj Rangan, the erudite film critic of The New Indian Express, provides the answer in an enlightening profile of the South's biggest star in a recent issue of Tehelka.
He agrees that Rajini’s off-screen appearances can be perplexing to the untrained eye, but he clarifies quickly: "...by untrained, I refer to the non-Tamil eye."
And he elaborates:
We Tamilians, after all, are used to the dichotomy of our heroes looking one way on screen and another in real life. Cinema is a manufactured medium, and it would stand to reason that the faces up there are manufactured too, made up with make-up. ... So we don’t really flinch when Rajinikanth comes to us bewigged on screen and bald off it. He is, after all, 60. Lesser men have been reduced to shiny domes at far younger ages. (Ask me. I should know.) So when, in an audio launch for Robot, Rajinikanth looks his age, looks like the grandfather that he is, it doesn’t frazzle us. He’s not acting now. He’s real. That’s all there is to it.
And then Baradwaj wonders if there is a lesson here for the aging heroes of Bollywood:
Perhaps Bollywood stars — especially the ones in their forties and upwards, some of whom apparently are staving off signs of aging with nips and tucks and hair weaves — can learn this lesson from Rajinikanth, that you can be yourself and your fans won’t stop loving you. On the contrary, they just may come to love you a little more.
And so I learnt two things here:
First, Rajini's attitude is worth emulating. Why should we pretend to be who or what we are not in real life?
Second, there is a difference in the mindsets of movie fans on either side of the Vindhyas.
Do you agree?
