Rajnikanth and the Japanese

In Tamil Nadu, we worship our film stars (in many cases literally: by building temples, installing their images as deities and actually conducting pooja). And of course among all the stars we adulate, Rajnikanth has a special place of his own. This macho hero, who can fell twenty rogues with one punch and cause a building to collapse by simply blowing hard on it, is revered in every nook and canny of Tamil Nadu, loved elsewhere in South India and pretty well-known even in the rest of the country. But I always took it for granted that the super star’s popularity, like the big rivers of the country, stopped at the shores of the nation.

“Do you think,” a friend asked me a few years ago, “Rajnikanth has fans outside India?”

I shook my head.

“Well, he does – in Japan!” he said.

“I don’t believe that,” I said. “That’s like telling me the Japanese have suddenly started eating uttapam instead of sushi.”

“They may not have taken to uttapam”, he said, “but they’ve definitely taken to Rajnikanth in a big way. In fact,” he continued when he saw me still looking sceptical, “Rajni’s 1998 film ‘Muthu’ was the first Tamil film to be dubbed into Japanese: it was released under the endearing name of ‘Mutu: Odoru Maharaja’ and it grossed a record $1.6 million in Japan.”

A man of principles

I’m a man of honour who lives by a few moral standards. One of these is: squeeze the last drop out of every rupee. Left to myself, I’m able to adhere to this principle. For example, though I frequently miss breakfast when I travel, I don’t do this if breakfast is included in the room rate. Sometimes, when the meeting organizers insist on “starting bright and early”, this means reaching the breakfast area at 7.15 a.m., a time when I’m less awake than hungry, groggily loading up my plate and eating my painful way through it. I do this whether I have paid for the room or my company because it’s the principle of the thing, not the money. Or rather, the money is the principle, not whose money.

However I’m often thwarted from following the path of honour by my wife.

Many parking lots in Singapore require drivers to display pre-paid parking tickets with the date and time of parking punched out in half-hour slots. Last month my wife requested me to drive her on a specific shopping errand. At the parking lot, before punching holes in the ticket, I turned to her.

“Will you be done in half an hour?”

“Why?” she asked.

“So that I can punch the appropriate time in this parking coupon.”

“Oh, in that case, make it one hour – to be safe.”

I explained that it was more important not to waste a punched coupon than ‘to be safe’ but she stuck to her estimate, so I punched two half-hour coupons worth 50 cents each and accompanied her to the shop.