Nikhilesh Sankaranarayanan

Draft of Expertise Speech

Who’s the biggest movie star in Hollywood? Tom Cruise? DiCaprio? Brad Pitt? Maybe Johnny Depp?
God Morgan Freeman?

What would you do if you saw them in public? Maybe sitting on a bench next to you, or sharing a
bus.
Now let’s take a trip to particular state somewhere in South India. There’s one very interesting
person living there. Some people call him an ‘actor’, but to millions – he is a god. This is Rajnikanth.

This man is perhaps the most famous person in all of India. He’s definitely the highest paid actor by
far. Having starred in over 150 films across multiple languages, he remains the central figure around
which the South Indian film industry revolves.

This may sound like an exaggeration, but the extent to which people have dedicated their lives to
him is astounding. Many dozens of Rajnikanth fan clubs exist that spend their own savings to erect
posters of him outside movie theatres, and conduct elaborate celebrations to ring in his new movies.
In treating a man like a God, there are no half measures.
In India, its common practice in some temples to pour milk on the idol of gods as an offering.

And this is what happens when a new Rajnikanth movie comes out.
In 2011, Rajnikanth became seriously ill and had to fly to Singapore for life-saving treatment. I still
remember that week, when the whole city came to a standstill. A bunch of Rajnikanth fans started a
rural prayer ritual, in which they eat rice off of a sandy floor to pray for his recovery.
Another fan went to the extent of piercing himself onto a platform and conducting a procession
through the streets to pray for the Superstar’s health.

Here are pictures of some die-hard fans climbing the steps (all 1305 of them) of a temple on their
knees, to pray for the success of one of his movies. Numerous fan-clubs comprising of these people
do many other crazy things before each of his movies releases.
So what is this phenomenon, where people treat a human being as some celestial entity? Let’s take
a look at how this man captured the hearts of millions of people and in their eyes, transcended
humanity.

Rajnikanth started his career as a bus conductor in the state of Tamil Nadu, India. Most of his early
films had him a villain or a negative role of some sort. But then it all changed with the movie Billa, in
which he plays 2 characters, a mafia boss and a regular dude. That film was an instant cult classic,
with its popularity has been attributed to his uniquely styled dialogues and idiosyncrasies in films.

Many of his popular mannerisms became insanely popular too, with many of the youth in the state
adopting them and mimicking him. One of his classics is the cigarette toss, where he throws a
cigarette up in the air, catches it in his mouth and lights it.

But most of all I think the reason he is so popular and successful is simply because of how audacious
and stylistic he is. To many of the people in the 70’s and 80’s, he was a symbol of hope. A man on
screen that lives so large they can forget about their lives and just revel in his majesty. On the flip
side, he’s generally known to be a humble, simple man off-screen which only endears him to the
masses even more. He is who they want to be, and yet is he one of them.