After reading the article "RAJINIKANTH AND THE COST OF STARDOM" written by Sundar Sarukkai and published in the Magazine supplement of The Hindu on 24th Aug 2025, as a film blog writer, my mind literally got exercised not only by the title of the article, but also by the concluding part of the article that read "Rajini, while still physically explosive on the screen has aged mentally and morally at least in his last few films. He seems to have lost the qualities that made him perennially young and relevant. We can't blame him. Perhaps he has become indifferent and tired. Just like us."
Times are the deciding factors of each one's course of life. Ideologies do exist in most individuals and find a firm base for the formation of many organizations, whichever kind of field they represent. Nostalgia can be nerve breaking, when changes become indispensable. But what kind of changes they are, determines the extension or erosion of the existing values.
"As flies to wanton boys are we to Gods. They kill us for their sport "is a famous quote from Shakespeare. Likewise, we are all puppets in the hands of changing trends, and no one can escape from the onslaught of changes. There is a cost for everything, and everybody has to pay the price for sustaining the image they had carved for themselves.
Cinema can never survive without image obsession. Stardom is built on this policy of obsession with image conservation. This was a reality in Tamil cinema until 1977,when MGR's film career came to a close, with his becoming the Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu. However, if MGR were a mass hero today, he would have also faced the similar predicament that the Superstar is said to be facing.
Unlike MGR and Sivaji Ganesan, who could influence the different limbs of Tamil Cinema, by their ideologies and acting zeal respectively, even the topmost heroes these days, do not seem to interfere in the film making process, at least with regard to the choice of themes and mode of screen play. When a senior most mass hero has to play the role of a protagonist in the films of young film makers, whose interests are varied, it is the priorities of film making trends that control the content and narration of the final film product.
The changing objectives of cinema will only decide the fate of longstanding social values and not attempt to spoil the stardom of a longstanding superstar. Hence unlike the views mentioned in the last paragraph of the aforesaid article, stardom can continue to exist at the cost of social priorities and objectives, that used to govern the society for long and in today's context, stardom and the changing trends have to coexist in a symbiotic mode.
To mention it differently, stardom comes to selective actors, not specifically by the social objectives as in the case of MGR, but by the roles assigned to them by the film makers and by the poignant ways the stars played those roles, as in the play list of Sivaji Ganesan and Kamalahasan. Unusually, in the case of Rajinikanth, stardom was naturally born of the uprise of a new wave style in acting, and the hero's profile perfectly befitted the newborn style, engrossing the audience with a kind of appeal, that was never witnessed before.
Rajinikanth's stardom knows how to sail with the winds. This stardom surpasses the new generation norms in film making, flooded with human aberrations of violence and brutality. No doubt, social objectives are being subsidized if not surrendered by the present-day yardsticks of character evolution, and events narration, in the film industry.
But as far as Rajinikanth is concerned,it is his style of acting that matters,and it does not look for any 'moral' obligation or 'mental' commitment to sustain his highly concretized stardom. It would be of course painful to acknowledge the surrounding depletion in human obligation, even to its nearest society. Nevertheless, one has to conclude cinematically, that films of the Superstar will continue to reach out to the audience and inspire them, may be at the cost of social values, but certainly not at the cost of stardom. The changed scenario of film making, will preserve and protect the stardom impact of the Superstar, until he himself decides to quit the silver screen or is made by time, to do so.
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