The fan clubs craze in the City

by Sridhar Chandra

Before you decide to act in a Tamil movie in any role – doesn’t matter what role it is – beware of the lurking danger of a few urchins accosting you with a proposal for a fan-club in your name. This is symptomatic of only one part of the world, Tamil Nadu! Here is a State that shocked the wits out of the former Bond movie-star Roger Moore when he was informed that there were 267 (a bit exaggerated, but not by much) fan clubs for him in Tamil Nadu. Take the case of Khushboo, a movie star who till she acted in Tamil movies had as much connection to Tamil Nadu as Osama Bin Laden had to Ahim­sa! The Tamil Nadu urchin-gang (including the not-so-urchins as well) built a chain of temples in her honour having been blown away by her rotund charms!

The fans create their heres taller and taller

Every Tom, Dick and Harry who acts in movies has ­fan-clubs in TN… the list can be pretty exhaustive and mind-numbing in many ways. To give you stray examples, there are fan clubs for people as diverse as Goundamani (a yesteryear comedy sidekick) to Quentin Tarantino (a Hollywood movie director, who has never heard the name Chennai – at least so far in his life), on to Bo Derek (who acted in a couple of ­movies in the 1980s, her claim to fame being her “nude” scenes in one of those), etc.

There are instances over the years where the fan-clubs of Tamil Nadu/Chennai have turned rather innovative in their methods of differentiation. Some snapshots:

1. Understanding that MGR fan-clubs were more in number, Sivaji’s fans came up with the novel idea of Parakkum-Padai (Flying Clubs). If you had guessed that these ‘Sivaji’ fans were into aviation in some way, I am sorry to disappoint you. Nothing of the sort. In fact, their exertions were firmly rooted to terra-firma, but they used to speed around Chennai on a bunch of motorcycles/mopeds/scooters/auto-rickshaws as the case may be, for no particular reason! This was rather aimless wandering except that they moved around the city, thereby differentiating themselves from more static MGR fan-clubs!

2. Rajini fans started the new concept of deifying their matinee-idol by performing milk abhishekam-s (a practice hitherto limited to idols of Hindu Gods such as Siva, Murugan, etc.) before large Rajini cut-outs in front of theatres on the date of release of his movies! There are instances when some fans were badly hurt falling from a height of about 35 feet (that is height of some of these cardboard cut-outs). They promptly followed this up by some frenzied camphor-burning (again practised only in Hindu temp­les, hitherto) in front of the movie-screens inside the theatres when Rajini first appeared on screen! Rajini’s fans started this new trend, and I reliably understand fans of even much lesser stars such as Simbu, Karthi, Vishal, Bharath, etc. are now following this ‘holy’ practice!

3. Realising the futility of matching wits against the numerically superior Rajini fans, Kamal fans started donating blood. This became a bit of a problem. In an urge to be different, they came in droves to blood-banks on the day of a Kamal movie release! I am talking about the days when blood-banks were ill-equipped to store blood and were basically taking donor blood for immediate transfusions and other needs. What do you do, when hundreds of blood-donors queue up when you basically need 5 units of blood? I am sure you get the point here…

Thus, steadily grew the fan-club movement of Tamil Nadu Chennai, paving the way for a new ecosystem around fan-clubs for, with time on their hands, every urchin in a kuppam starts identifying himself as a ‘fan’ at some point in his life. This could be age 10, 12, or whatever. But the key is once he declares himself a ‘fan’, he is no longer plain Murugan or David any more. He becomes ‘Rajini Karthik’, ‘Kamal Muru­gan’, ‘MGR David’, ‘Sivaji Selvam’, etc. This is just the re-naming part. But there is more. Every single event in his life now starts revolving around his new identification. When he completes 10th Grade (many of them actually don’t, but that is a problem we are not tackling here), he persuades his father (who himself is ‘MGR Muruge­san’) to put up a giant poster at the entrance of the kuppam, which has two big images – the image of Rajinikanth (assuming that is the affiliation of our subject) and an image of our subject, albeit in a submissive pose in front of his matinee-idol. And then there is a small write-up congratulating the subject on his successful completion of 10th Grade! And so it goes… posters spring up on his graduation, his employment, his ­engagement, his marriage, his getting a child, his girl child ­attaining puberty(!), his 40th birthday, his 50th birthday, etc.

So with the kind of compulsions that the average urchin is under, you can imagine the scramble for stars/actors to associate with. MGR, Sivaji, Raji­ni were hot commodities simply because everyone wanted to be their fans. In the fan-club pecking order, there is an unsaid ­hierarchy that is in constant ­operation. MGR and Rajini would be certainly at the top followed by the likes of Sivaji, Kamal, Vijay, Ajith, Suriya, etc. But as you can easily surmise, these get taken rather swiftly in every kuppam! So there is a mad scramble for any and every other actor who sounds like he/she may last at least for a while. Many ‘idols’ chosen, however, do not last the pace.

For example, you can sympathise with the urchin who early in life plumped for Mike Mohan (the guy who lip-synced all those memorable Ilayaraja numbers of the 1980s). After a brief period of glory, Mohan ­literally vanished from the silver screen around late 1980s. So our subject who had a beaming poster wherein he starred alongside his hero Mike Mohan ­during his school-leaving days, soon found himself badly disadvantaged at the time of his wedding! A huge poster today for a non-existent star would have been a travesty of sorts.

Some fans, however, are known to switch and others make a huge leap into Hollywood sometimes. That is one of the reasons we have fan-clubs for the likes of Bruce Lee, Jackie Chan, Van Damme, Sylvester Stallone, Jet Li, etc. Hollywood muscle-men are easy picks as opposed to classy actors like Dustin Hoffman, De Niro, etc.

You may wonder if the film actor in question has anything to do with the frenzied following that he/she accidentally inspires. The answer is ‘yes’ and ‘no’. It is a resounding ‘No’ for unsuspecting actor-victims such as Jet Li and Tom Cruise who have no clue whatsoever about their surging fan-clubs mushrooming in murky kup­pam-s of North Chennai. You can’t exactly blame someone like Claude Van Damme if Vel­murugan, Secretary of Se­ven Wells Van Damme Fan Club, spends the hard-earned money of his labourer-mother to put up a giant poster for his (Velmu­rugan’s) engagement to ‘Trisha Selvi’ where on one side we would see Van Damme and on the other “Trisha”! I would imagine Van Damme would heartily disagree and discourage Velmurugan from squandering his mother’s hard-earned mo­ney like this… but, alas, he has no clue that such a fan exists in a remote corner of the world!

But when it comes to Indian (specifically Tamil) actors, the answer may be ‘Yes’. For example, if a bunch of auto-drivers put up an ‘X’ Auto-Stand with a picture of actor ‘X’ and small passport size pics of all autodrivers of that particular kuppam, X may actually welcome it. He may even part-fund this activity as long as the cost doesn’t pinch him. There are instances when some actors got fed up with requests such as this and disbanded their respective fan-clubs. A recent example is Ajith. He perhaps figured out the futility of this whole fan-club jing-bang. He simply announced to the press that he is disbanding his fan-clubs!

If you were to analyse this whole phenomenon from a philosophical perspective (however futile that exercise may be), you are sure to come to only one conclusion. That the average Tamil Nadu kuppam urchin is much more comfortable associating himself with another person than being himself. And then there is this matter of peer-pressure. Whatever it is, finally, you cannot deny the sheer fun of watching a super star’s movie on the first day of its release as it is sure to unleash the beast among his fans.

I had a recent experience on the day of the release of Robot (Enthiran in Tamil) when fans went berserk, lighting 10,000-wala and 20,000-wala crackers all over the city. I was told that coconuts, milk and camphor were in short-supply because of the demand for abhishekam-s and aarthi-s at all the screens that released the movie (more than 60 in Chennai alone)! Fan-clubs had pre-booked all tickets for all shows and if an average person like me wanted to see it on the first day the only option was to buy in black (I had to cough up a huge sum myself, just for the experience!). What else do you expect in a culture where even a God is referred to as Thalaivar (meaning leader)?

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