JioMAMI Day 3: All about Rajinikanth's stardom in Rinku Kalsy's docu 'For the Love of a Man'

By Tanul Thakur The central premise of Rinku Kalsy’s 80-minute documentary, For the Love of a Man, which explores the incredible fandom of Rajinikanth, is this: If you want to understand God, you won’t find your answers in a temple, but in the minds and hearts of his devotees. We know the kind of adulation and madness Rajinikanth inspires in his fans, but who exactly are they, and what are they really after? For the Love of a Man, playing in the India Story section of the JIO MAMI Mumbai Film Festival, gives names and stories to them. These are ordinary people, belonging to different social and economic standing, who have remarkable stories to tell. [caption id=“attachment_2491704” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Poster of the film. Image from Facebook.[/caption] There’s G. Mani, an erstwhile gangster who was so affected by Rajinikanth’s films that he straightened out his life; he’s now a peanut-seller. There’s a bunch of college students who manage a Facebook group called Superstar Rajinikanth, which shares latest information and pictures about their “Thalaivar” and trends him on Twitter. There are N. Ravi and Murugan, owners of a sweetshop in Sholingur, a small town in Tamil Nadu, who talk about what they went through when Rajinikanth was sick and admitted in a hospital in Singapore a few years ago. And then there’s Babu, a mimicry artist, who makes a living or, more appropriately, lives a life worth living by impersonating Rajinikanth. “Being a Rajini fan is not easy,” says one of them quite early in the movie. “It’s a huge responsibility.” Another fan admires the actor in a picture, where he’s a wearing a white kurta and veshti, and says, “He’s looking like a lion.” He pauses for a while and adds: “A white lion.” Someone else, struggling to find the appropriate words to praise the star, finally comes up with this: “There are basically two kinds of people — humans and yogis; Rajinikanth is somewhere in between. You can call it the Rajini level.” For the Love of a Man is split into two parallel narratives (via five chapters and an epilogue) — one tracking the individual stories of the four aforementioned fans, and the other revolving around film historians and analysts trying to decode the Rajinikanth fandom. This structural choice is ambitious, but it doesn’t always work. For nearly the first half of the documentary, you can see Kalsy striving hard for a narrative but failing to arrive at one (and it’s not surprising why, for this segment is heavy on academics talking about the star). Moreover, the transition between these interviews and the stories of Rajinikanth’s fans isn’t always smooth. Kalsy often ends up devoting a large chunk of the documentary’s runtime to one particular narrative, and by the time she cuts to the next, the long passage of time ends up eating away much of its sheen. The documentary, however, comes into its own in the latter half, when Kalsy enters the lives of Rajinikanth’s fans and shows us the price of this unique passion. G. Mani can barely make ends meet, but he mortgages his wife’s jewelry worth Rs 60,000 to organise an event for the superstar; N. Ravi battled sleepless nights for more than a week when Rajinikanth was admitted in a hospital, and when he failed to cope with his new found trauma, he sent his younger brother, Murugan, to Singapore to check if their God was okay. Murugan didn’t question why; he simply went. These moments go beyond being cute or baffling. Recounting that incident in front of camera, Murugan is on the verge of tears: “We had no father while growing up. He [Rajinikanth] was the one who taught us everything.” You can possibly question an action; you can’t question a life circumstance. Rajinikanth is not just a movie star for these fans; he’s become their raison d’être, their life’s purpose. Almost every fan in the documentary says he’s a big Rajini fan not just because of his acting skills, but for the fact that he’s such a “good human being”, that he wears “ordinary clothes, a rubber slipper and keeps up with Tamil culture”. We often distort reality to suit our conveniences, for our stories. The line between what we see and what we want to see — and believe — can often blur, and it’s in between these two worlds that Rajinikanth’s fandom — or, for that matter, of any Indian movie star — lives and subsists, perpetually swinging between joy and heartbreak, affection and reverence. You can dismiss these beliefs as naïve, deluded or even misguided, but For the Love of a Man is trying to say something else, something fundamental: Being in love, especially when you are not bothered about it being reciprocated, is truly wonderful and liberating; it may come with its own imperfections and lows, but isn’t that a risk we all take? Isn’t that a risk worth taking? Watch For the Love of a Man at JioMAMI Mumbai Film Festival on Nov 3, 6:00 pm at PVR Pheonix (screen 2). Reliance Jio Infocomm Limited is a venture of Reliance Industries, which owns Network18 (of which Firstpost is a part).