Times of India
 
MUMBAI, Jun 27: Mandar Thakur, a Maharashtrian businessman who doesn’t understand a word of Tamil, delayed his return flight from Chennai to Mumbai just to catch a screening of Tamil superstar Rajnikanth’s latest flick Sivaji — The Boss. "I couldn’t leave without seeing it," he admits.

"There was so much hysteria all around that I just had to know what this was about." Using what he describes as "connections in a high place", Thakur managed to wangle tickets to Sivaji at the chock-a-block Sathyam multiplex in the city, where people had been queuing up from 2.30 am the previous night to buy their ‘darshan’ of Rajni Saar. He was blown away.

"Sivaji is not a film," he says dramatically. "It is an experience. I didn’t understand the dialogue at all. But Rajnikanth’s presence, his gimmicks and his style just towered above it all."

If Chennai has been in the grip of Sivaji mania for the past two weeks, things aren’t very different in Mumbai where non-Tamilians have been standing shoulder to shoulder with their Southside brethren for tickets to the film. On June 24 when rains lashed the city, Nambi Rajan of Aurora cinema at Matunga was amazed to see hundreds braving the downpour outside the theatre. "A majority of the crowd was North Indian," says Rajan, who is distributing the film in Mumbai and Delhi and its environs.

Another distributor, Tolu Bajaj, has seen Sivaji twice in one week. "I don’t understand Tamil but I didn’t need to," he says. "I just went to see Rajnikanth and his Rajni-isms." For those not in the know, the latter include a dizzy multitude of logic and gravity-defying stunts and patented mannerisms like flicking a cigarette in the air before mouthing it or doing an impossible whirligig with a pair of sunglasses before putting them on. You could die laughing. Or you could worship the idiosyncrasies, as Rajni fans, a sizable legion, do.

Bajaj, who saw the film at the la-di-dah SoBo multiplex, Inox, says that 50% of the audience was non-Tamil, and he could actually feel the air crackling with excitement. "This doesn’t happen even for a Bollywood film, especially in a multiplex," says the man who has been distributing Hindi films for over two decades.

Adds Neetu Chandra, the leading lady of Garam Masala and Traffic Signal, "It was mind-boggling. When his entry, a close-up of his shoes, was beamed, the pandemonium in the theatre was deafening. People actually got up and began to dance in front of the screen."

Film-maker Parvesh Sippy, who doesn’t speak a word of Tamil either, was also elated by the Sivaji experience. "The story is no rocket science," he says, dismissing the Robin Hood script out of hand. "But with Rajni filling the screen with his larger-than-life anti-establishment image, the price of the ticket money is well worth it. I barely followed the dialogue despite having an interpreter. But the way he pops his chewing gum, wiggles a one-rupee coin or drums his bald head musically with his fingers is all so addictive. No wonder people are mesmerised with this guy."

Trade analyst Amod Mehra confirms that the film has been houseful over the second weekend in the 17 Mumbai and Thane theatres where it was released, and is still drawing capacity crowds in Sangli, Latur and others parts of India. "With the exception of Indore, where it has flopped, Sivaji has done record business all over," he says.

So what is it about the film that is drawing the hordes? "It’s the hype," says Mehra. "A large section of the media has just woken up to the Rajni phenomenon.

And the continuous debates and reportage on the film are definitely responsible for the increasing box-office collections."

Outside PVR, Juhu, Pia Banerjee, a Mumbai college student says, "Like Jackie Chan, Rajnikanth too has a mass following because he does the kind of stuff that mesmerises an audience. His actions defy gravity. He is Superman, Spiderman and Batman rolled into one. Perhaps therein lies the appeal."