“Superstar” is a dream word for today’s young gen heroes. Acting as a protagonist in a commercial film is as tedious as acting in an off-beat film.
While it is easy to make the audience believe a character that has been sketched with realism, it is not an easy task to sketch a mass hero character in a convincing way.

People won’t believe if an ordinary man throws his shoe at someone and the same shoe after hitting the opponent comes back to his own foot. Similarly, if a method actor delivers punch dialogues they will hardly listen to it. But with a superstar, they look forward to all the above and if the super star does not deliver what they expect, they will lose their interest and admiration for the actor.

It needs a lot of hard as well as smart work to become a super star. When Rajini entered Tamil cinema, Kamal was a recognizable star and when Rajini became a recognizable star, Kamal was a superstar.

Rajini had a lot of limitations including his looks. But he did not choose to follow anyone’s footstep, but he created a path for himself. He adopted a new prototype for himself and that paved the way for his super star status.

In Rajini’s own words, from the Kamal’s 50th year anniversary in film industry, “ Kamal achieved what I did, but I didn’t even touch Kamal’s achievement. My peers from Andhra and Bollywood are curious to know as to how I went to become a superstar despite the presence of Kamal in Tamil cinema. I just changed my route and followed a different ideology”. Yes, when Kamal was interested in experimenting with different roles, Rajini decided to attract people with his style and mannerisms.

One of the most talked about Rajini mannerism is the way he catches cigarettes in films. The cigarette catching style of Rajini looks uber stylish but the fact that he has undergone a lot of practice to perfect that style, cannot be denied. He even suffered burn wounds in attempting such styles. Now, one can use computer graphics to portray such scenes, but in the 80’s and 90’s CG was not feasible and it meant that one has to do these gimmicks on their own.

Rajini’s hair adjusting style is another much-talked about mannerism. The way in which Rajini uses his hand to adjust his hair has been incorporated in several scenes, which has been copied by the youngsters and roadside Romeos alike.

Rajinikanth has a style when he spins the towel in Muthu and he did it with so much style, much to the delight of his fans. He used a turban and the famous Baba symbol as a style statement in the film Baba and at one point of time even a normal gesture like pointing a figure up and down became a style for him.

Though he did not use cigars in his recent films, he used chewing gum instead of cigar in Sivaji , which again got tremendous response from the masses.

Sources close to the Superstar has revealed that Rajini used to discuss a lot on these mannerisms with his directors in the 80’s and 90’s and he used to come up with different gestures before finalising on the apt one to go with the script. If we do a quick recap on his famous punch dialogues, we will understand that all his punch dialogues suited the script and his character perfectly. He has never used unnecessary punch dialogues in his films.

People may think that becoming a superstar /mass hero is an easy task, but it is not. It needs immense hard work, smartness and all the more the willingness to walk that extra mile. Rajinikanth is a master at it and that’s why he is a Superstar.