I too salute thee...

To question stuff that doesn’t quite fit the perceived norm is a done thing with most of us I am guessing. I am no exception to the norm either so when I see a zillion people standing in queues waiting for up to 4-6 hours in the Chennai sun, I was really awestruck. Admittedly, my first thoughts for the swarming crowds drenched in their perspiration (and maybe of the guy standing next) were…

“Folks…please get a life! It’s just a movie for God’s sake!!!”

All this while the other line of thought I had was a rising sense of displeasure towards the man who is causing this kind of mass hysteria in people. How could someone so shamelessly enjoy the demigod status bestowed upon him by people so simple and so entrenched in their daily miseries…they forget that the joke is on them?

And while I was shifting from a sense of pity for the people who’ve once again been conned to the irresponsible demeanor of a so-called “megastar”…I noticed something. When I looked closely at the line extending to the moon in front of one of the movie theatres playing “Sivaji”…I realized my folly.

Who were the people that made the “mass” in the whole mass hysteria? They weren’t just over-enthu college goers or street urchins. Braving the sun and the humidity were grandpas with their little grand kids on their shoulders, fathers taking a day off from work holding the excited son’s hand, mothers coming in groups of 4-5 ladies after finishing their household chores and a thousand others about whom we don’t read about in the papers or in magazines or in the glossy page-3s.

So if in our often mundane lives, routine jobs, unfulfilled aspirations and daily hardships if there comes along a reason that lets us forget all that and gives us a chance to rejoice together...what’s so wrong about it? If the rich and the poor, the educated and the illiterate, the foreign return and the born and will die here…everyone is standing in the same line for another genius + mindless performance by his highness Rajnikant, why does it even call for an analysis?

When the reasons to smile are being fast outrun, outpaced and outnumbered by the ones to frown and sulk…

I say why not “Sivaji”? Why not Rajnikant?

Suddenly, I was victim of my own persecution. Guilty as hell about my first thoughts but I am glad I know my path to salvation…

…I have tickets of “Sivaji” for this weekend!