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.
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