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.

Man's quest for beauty

Man has always been besotted with beauty in his beau. But with the woman moving from kitchen to boardroom, the child becoming more mature – or cheeky – at a younger age and the inanimate object becoming sleeker and technologically advanced, it is only appropriate that man is no longer stuck to this hidebound, restricted notion of beauty. He now desires it for himself.

After writing about this phenomenon (in my usual incisive fashion) last fortnight, I met an old friend Sumit Chatterjee at his club. Chatterjee, careful about his appearance even in college, had become increasingly dapper and well-groomed over the years; therefore I was surprised to see his shaggy look today.

“What happened?” I asked. “Did you lose your razor? Are you waiting for an auspicious day to buy a new one?”

He looked annoyed as he softly ran his fingers around his stubble-bearing cheek and chin.

“I don’t use a razor any longer,” he said coldly. “I use a beard trimmer.”

“That’s not a beard!” I corrected him. “Grow it two more weeks; then call it a beard.”

“I have no intention of calling it a beard,” Chatterjee said. “It’s fashionable stubble. Have you typed ‘Brad Pitt images’ into Google?”

Beauty and... where's the beast?

In my early days of living in Singapore, I remember sitting through the movie ‘Beauty and the Beast’ with difficulty: the film had lacked that drama and pizazz necessary to hold the raptured attention of an action movie buff whose last cinematic experience had been ‘Mission Impossible II’. I had got suckered into this outing in the first place, along with my wife, by a friend whose children had been pestering him for days to watch this Disney entertainment. “Let’s all go,” my friend had said to me enthusiastically on the phone, “I understand it’s fantastic.” Later I learnt that he had understood this, not – as I had assumed – from some eminent film critic of the New York Times, but from the very six-year old twins who had wanted to watch it in the first place. Talk about a biased sample! Anyway where was I? Yes, I was walking out of the theatre with relief that this particularly move experience was behind me.

“How did you like the movie?” my friend Ravi said when we exited.

I smiled gently to convey: “It was awful, but I’m too polite to tell you that.”

He interpreted it differently. “Exactly! I loved it too.”

“Me too,” said his wife Rita. “But the concept of ‘beauty and the beast’ is no longer valid.”

My God! I thought, don’t tell me watching that drivel wasn’t enough: we’re now going to analyse it too?