Let me start this with a disclaimer up front that I hold no brief for Allu Arjun, popularly known as AA nor am I a fan of him. This helps my readers to read this without bias. Having seen Pushpa1, I was eagerly waiting for the next Pushpa2 because I was eager to know how the police and the criminals transformed themselves with the former role donned by Fahd Fasil.
Waiting for the crowds to subside and then I hope to watch the movie in a theatre. Now I understand we are threatened with Pushpa3 also. Even before watching the movie, we are now seeing a different real-life movie which seems to be a precursor for Pushpa2. The real incident is his arrest as a result of the death of a woman in a stampede whose child is still on a ventilator with faint signs of recovery though lakhs are praying for his return to normalcy.
Forty-one-year-old Allu Arjun with two children has indeed come up the hard way and if you see his first picture as a full-fledged hero in Gangotri (though as a child artiste, he acted in another movie Swathi Muthyam), you would have loved the songs more than his appearance or acting.
The melodious songs of the movie introduced Allu Arjun to the reluctant audience which didn’t accept him straight away. Technically Gangothri is his third movie as in between he acted as a 19-year son in Daddy where he played a brief cameo. It was through his dance in this movie when his talent appeared blossoming.
The entire Allu family which includes Chiranjeevi, his brothers, and the rest of the children is literally a mega family of megastars and as Pawan Kalyan exhorted ‘united we stand and divided we fall’, it has followed that in the letter and spirit because of which AA could smell the jail for a few hours only, notwithstanding the groundswell of support across the country and abroad for his immediate release. He took the moral standing and rose to the occasion of sympathising with the affected family, assuring ₹25L besides any help in the process of the family getting back on track. He now offered to call on the family in person.
The father was so moved by his arrest that he offered to withdraw the case saying that his tragedy is not because of the star but rather the insistence of his son to somehow see the movie. Secondly, one may ask why AA had to go to a rather less posh hall than any of the multiplexes scattered all over the city. He explained that he has been watching his movies for over ten years in the same theatre with no incident in the past. The fan base for a star doesn’t happen overnight. It gets strengthened movie after movie and reaches a flash point when fans go berserk.
AA joins the bandwagon of all superstars starting from NTR and till date. What makes them so in people’s minds? When one family dominates, comparison is natural and, in the process, AA called fondly Bunny happened to have clinched the top slot with a series of box office hits be it a pleasant Ala Vaikunthapuramulo or belligerent Pushpa 2 as a sequel to Pushpa 1.
That such a star with so much of a fan following on pan India basis is a force to reckon with. Success made himself vulnerable to this incident at Sandhya theatre turning out to be a sad development for him. More than that, what baffles everyone is the alacrity with which things move be it his arrest and release in a more cinematic fashion than his original Pushpa2. Nowhere in the world, the judiciary in our country is the fastest with another extreme of being the slowest when judgments are delivered in favour of the dead.
The gap in between the two speeds seems to be inversely proportional to the money a client is ready to pay. The more a client pays the less the time calculated in minutes if not seconds and the less you pay it is in months, years, and infinity too with the poorest people getting their justice only through their prayers to God rather than their efforts or money or both.
Just like movies have masala, this real episode for AA also had the ingredient of his forgetting the name of the CM who is alleged to have taken revenge precisely for the same reason.
Though AA covered up by saying his throat getting choked up and after a glass of water, he uttered the entire name with all courtesies that go with it. But our vulturous crowd is not going to take things lying down that RR and his colleagues had to give clarification that there was no revenge whatsoever in his arrest. Somehow right from the beginning, people have been seeing RR with one more R denoting revenge from the way he was going ahead again in a Pushpa manner of ‘thaggede le’, be it Hydra, Lagcherla, arrest of BRS leaders etc.
While the INC social media, ministers, and MLCs came in support of RR when Karti Chidambaram punctured all of them by saying that before arrest some investigation should have taken place. Poor fence sitters like Danam had to struggle to support AA and at the same time defend RR, a toughest task indeed. The police tried to defend saying that the letter from the theatre was given in Inward section and that no one met the concerned officer. Is it necessary to meet the officer when the letter is supposed to reach his desk anyway and by default they have to take action.?
In this digital era, it is essential that we put aside the colonial mindset and go about our work automatically. How and where this real-life movie will take AA remains to be seen. The case will go on and the story may be never ending. AA may be wondering if even Pushpa3 may have an end at last but this arrest syndrome may go on since it is in the court. We have seen Salman going through the tareek pe tareek. So, AA may have to set aside some precious time for making rounds to courts till the case is given a final burial for good.
His scriptwriters may weave a script on the real-life story of AA getting arrested, getting medically examined, and produced before the courts with the lower court sending him to 14-day remand and the High Court giving bail all in just 10 hours flat but yet spending the night in barracks. A good story writer can pump some fiction and make a crime thriller turning it into a box office a la Pushpa. And if that succeeds, he can call on RR for thanksgiving as but for him he wouldn’t have made this movie. Last but not the least, he can thank his own forgetfulness at the end of the day.
