The Dadasaheb Phalke award conferred on Rajinikanth is another acknowledgement of the mass adulation he enjoys and it is richly deserved.
Born into a Marathi speaking family, a young Shivaji Rao Gaikwad got to do everything that middleclass children in Basavanagudi in tranquil south Bengaluru could do. He worked for a brief while as a coolie and then became a bus conductor.
Professionally known as Rajinikanth, he began his film career with negative roles. In the decades that followed, he delivered hundreds of hits, mainly in Tamil, creating memorable characters and delivering punch dialogues that drove fans into a frenzy.
His evolution from bad man to hero to quasi saint is surely one of Indian cinema’s most intriguing real life stories, and his rise has already become a subject worthy of study in a school textbook.
With his exaggerated mannerisms, his cigarette popping is an enduring gimmick that he moved to the other extreme. There is much that is admirable in Rajinikanth, and even Bollywood, which had for long looked at the southern films more with amusement than respect, now accepts him as a phenomenon with few parallels.
