Rajinikanth’s fans - all 7.7 billion of them (not official figure, obviously) - have taken umbrage to the trailer of the yet to release Tamil film Comali.
At about 1:58 on YouTube, the Comali trailer takes a dig at how TN’s superstar, Rajinikanth has been playing hot-and-cold with politics, since 1995, and all of his movies from before and after.
In the trailer of Comali, Jayam Ravi plays a character who has been in coma for 16 years. In a bid to convince him that it’s been a while since he was awake, his friend (Yogi Babu) plays a clip of Rajinikanth saying he would enter politics, at his fan meet in 2017. The just-about-awake Jayam Ravi replies, ‘This is 1996, you can’t fool me!’
The Backlash
Twitter was up in arms, with a range of memes, from abusive;
to apologetic;
to downright unrelated;
Jayam Ravi, the lead actor, is bearing the brunt of the fan attack, and is yet to respond. But honestly, it’s hard to respond to tweets like these:
Rajinikan’t, I mean, Can!
According to a report in The Hindu, Murali Abbas, the spokesperson for Kamal Haasan’s political party Makkal Neethi Maiyam said the actor / politician had called the producer (Isari K Ganesh) to say he didn’t like the trailer and that it was in bad taste.
But meme-ing the superstar’s long-awaited foray into electoral politics isn’t a new phenomenon. The dig at the year ‘96, when Rajinikanth was supposed to have announced his political entry isn’t altogether false.
In a 1995 Doordarshan interview, Rajinikanth admitted to meeting the then Prime Minister (PV Narasimha Rao) for more than just courtesy.
Rajinikanth was earlier denied an appointment with Jayalalithaa (who was the CM at the time), to talk about police harassment of his fan clubs, which by then had mushroomed in the thousands.
His support for the DMK-TMC alliance led to a historic victory for them, thanks to his fan base. But his charisma failed him in the next election, when the DMK lost badly, despite his support. So while the loyalty of his fan base has been established, his political gumption is yet to be tested in deeper waters.
Meme or no meme, the question of when (if at all) the Thalaiva of Tollywood will raise his hands in ‘Political Vanakkam’, still stands. In a trailer that boldly wears unfunny jokes in ill-fitting trousers, this one dig at Thalaiva can easily be ignored, but the backlash seems to have been too much for the makers of Comali.
According to latest reports, the producer has now decided to delete the controversial scene taking a dig at Rajinikanth’s political entry.
All’s well that ends well.
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