I have to make a disclaimer at the beginning. I’m not a complete stra-nger to the Tamil tongue, as I have a spouse who is Tamilian. Quasi, actually, because he’s been born and brought up in the North, lays claim to Punjabi as his first language, and has a reasonable hold on Tamil, but only in that order.

In my years as a Delhi-based card carrying film critic, I’ve encountered Rajni in his Bollywood outings. Back when he did a jig with Sridevi in Chaalbaaz, or fought with Amitabh in Hum to trounce the baddies, he was not so big. He was just a very popular South Indian star trying to cross over to the North, like his compatriot, Kamal Haasan.

But unlike Haasan, whom I’ve dutifully tried watching in Tamil, minus subtitles, in Madras, I’ve never had the pleasure of doing Rajni in the original. The Kamal film was Guna, and I was all agog with the whole deal — participating in the popular culture of the place, picking up the vibes from the audience of a Tamil film in the heartland.

It was a disaster. The film was relentlessly dark, Kamal’s role had him act morose, and the dialogues were delivered in rapidfire Tamil.

The only other time I watched a Tamil film minus subtitles was during the 1998 press show for national award winning films. Iruvar, Mani Ratnam’s take on the real-life rivalry between MGR and Karunanidhi, came off as a heavy political allegory, in which the cast spends a lot of time declaiming. There were murmurs from the gathering as soon as it was apparent that there would be no subtitles: most of my fraternity, protesting loudly, upped and left.

... contd.