And language no bar

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.

I sat through, missed almost everything, and spent the time conjecturing and surmising, and catching Aishwarya in her brief but effective debut. To a largely English/Hindi speaker like me, Iruvar was a lot of sound and fury, signifying very little. But it left a residual regret, of not being able to understand, to only connect.

So when last week, a serious film-goer friend called to ask if I’d go see Sivaji with her, and would ‘my translator’ please come as well, I leapt at it. Getting past the hype to the real thing? Totally.

The Sivaji publicity bandwagon was like nothing else, having begun its drum rolls months before the release. I have preserved an SMS from an industry watcher , which goes like this: “Breaking news from South India... Car parking and cycle stand fee collection for Sivaji found to be more than the box office collection of Jhoom Barabar Jhoom...”

... contd.