CHENNAI: Rule 1 of being a Rajinikanth fan-club member is to not admit that the Superstar’s film is terrible. Through the box office maelstroms that Baba, Kuselan, Kochadaiiyaan, and most recently Lingaa turned out to be, the fans have weathered all using the stiff upper lip and sycophancy in equal measure.
Unfortunately, that resolve is being severely tested as the distributors who lost money with Lingaa are on the warpath. Among the several revelations that tumbled out of the closet is the one that fans have taken very hard - the fact that they have sought refund for the special shows screened on the release day, as most of the theatres saw only half the number of seats filled. Or less.
Though unwilling to say anything against Rajini, the pressure of repaying loans has got to the fans, “It’s not easy for us to talk about how our Thalaivar’s movie tickets did not get sold out for the first show. The problem is that all of us in the fan club are from struggling families and we had taken Rs 4 lakh on loan at a hefty interest to buy the tickets up front. When we lost nearly half of that amount, we had to get it back from the theatre owners,” said a member of the Mettupalayam Rajinikanth Fans Welfare Association, the reluctance in his voice replete. This particular fan club lost Rs 2.04 lakh on the first show tickets and has managed to receive two payments of Rs 1 lakh and Rs 94,000 within a week from the owner of Sivasakthi theatre.Fans from Pattukottai are even more distraught because they had taken money from loan sharks amounting to Rs 7.70 lakh to buy the first tickets, “The responsibility to sell those tickets was on us. After taking away the complimentary tickets and so on, we were only pricing them at Rs 300-400, but even with that only 1,600 of the 4,600 seats were filled,” said a letter from N Thirunavukarasu, Town Secretary of the Fan Club there. They lost a whopping Rs 4.10 lakh on the first day and sought help from the distributor asking for a refund. Irony stems from the fact that the man who repaid that Rs 1 lakh is R Singaravadivelan, who is the spearhead of all the anti-Rajini protests.
In spite of all this, Rajini fans will still be Rajini fans. Even as the distributors have announced March 1 as the date for their begging protest outside the actor’s Poes Garden residence, die hard fans like Nellai G Karthikeyan are on the warpath - announcing a counter strike on “any and every protest against their kadavul”.