I’m not going to attempt to write a review of the book ‘cos its simply not worth it. I finished reading the book a couple of hours ago and the impact is fresh in my mind.
To begin with, I’m a fan of Rajnikanth and am looking at it from a fan’s perspective. According to this interview, Gayathri Sreekanth decided to write Rajnikanth’s biography ‘cos of the hype that surrounded Sivaji. She doesn’t seem like a fan and frankly, her book lacks passion. Her preface sounds too much like a blog rather than the prelude to the biography of a man, rather a superstar, who has crazy fan following world wide. At lots of places in the book, its very clear that the seriousness of the task she undertook never really hit her. Or maybe she assumed that this book was for the elite audience that admired Rajni and not the masses. Whatever the case maybe, its completely unacceptable that she’s got her facts wrong. She’s got names of movies, directors, heroines, years all messed up. There are even spelling errors in the book! Did the publishing house flush their brains down the toilet? Let alone the publishing house, what happened to the veterans like Lata Rajnikanth, Cho, and even Soundarya who have endorsed this book! Apparently, Lata was the one who gave the go-ahead for this book.
UPDATE:
After some pings and comments that I got, let me cite the most glaring error that features in the first few pages of the book itself.
“He began to get noticed in Tamil cinema. His first film as a hero was the blockbuster Apporva Raajmangal. K. Balachandar, his mentor, again cast him as the main lead in a slapstick comedy Moondu Mudichu. And after that there was no looking back to the gradual rise to super stardom.”
1) The name of the movie is Apoorva Ragangal.
2) He wasn’t the hero, he appears for less than 10 mins on screen.
3) The name of the movie is Moondru Mudichu
4) He wasn’t the lead of that movie, Kamal was. He was the villian.
5) Its not a slapstick comedy. Its a very serious movie about a man who will do anything to be with the woman he lusts though she’s with his best friend.
Just the tip of the iceberg!
As long as we’re still on the topic of the publisher, this is Super Star’s biography and I expected the cover to be a lot more sensational. Not the same old boring “vella moonji” still from Sivaji that’s been flashed in the media about a million times.
A lot of people spoke about the “rare” photographs and posters in this book. I didn’t find that very impressive either. I’ve seen all the pictures in this book circulated around earlier. In short, it seems like she went and sat in a library, made a list of the major events in Rajni’s life, traced newspaper articles, got paper clippings of everything, put it together in the form of a book. Even there, you feel like she starts talking about a certain event and then abruptly switches to something else. Is she trying to be politically right or doesn’t she have all the pieces of her puzzle? Her contribution to the book seems to have to stopped with her interpretations of why Rajni is successful that have graced the preface. She has twisted around a few quotes and formed her conclusions from it. Again, this is where her lack of passion clearly mirrors through.
The one thing I liked about this book is the way she’s sequenced the events in his life. Its makes it slightly more interesting that its not chronological. But then again, the hitch is that, she kinda re-quotes people in the same context in two different parts of the book and that doesn’t aid the flow of the book.
As a fan, what I would’ve liked to see in Rajni’s biography is a passionate account of this man’s life with more input the man himself. This thoughts, his feelings, his passions and his ideas. Not some ophthalmologist’s half baked enthusiasm.
In Rajni’s words, time waste, money waste, everything waste!
