August 14 will mark a Red-letter day for millions of his fans all over the globe…social media, the barometer of a film’s likely success in the first weekend of its release, has already closed its doors to naysayers and toxic critics. Shivaji Rao Gaekwad, known popularly as Superstar Rajinikanth in the country’s leading celluloid centres has his 171st film – Coolie - awaiting release two days from now, a tribute to his 50 years saga in Indian cinema in which he was seen in all the four southern language films, apart from Hindi and Bengali. Love him or hate him, one cannot ignore him…that’s the current niche of Rajinikanth in Indian cinema.

A filmi career, which began with a relatively insignificant role with the 1975 Independence Day release ‘Apoorva Ragangal’ in Tamil has, five decades later, attained an unmatched global recognition and fame: the stuff of legends, so to say. Unlike many before him and after, who arrived with a bang, shone for a while and went into oblivion, this ordinary-looking hero by conventional standards, started steadily, overtook all his competitors at breakneck speed and stayed put at the top, encountering challenges with a rare survival mantra of his own right from the 1980s.

Primarily anchored in the Tamil cinema field, with many of his hit flicks dubbed and remade into other languages, Rajinikanth is what the Tamil media hails ‘the eternal entertainer for fans from the ages of six to sixty’; the “Thalaivar” who reigns supreme. So much so, even after he turned a senior citizen, 15 years ago, his swagger and his solo hero stature continued to endure and was cashed in repeatedly by leading banners of south India.

His box-office status may have taken quite a few hard knocks in this period, with the last few releases see-sawing between being declared blockbusters and duds, yet he is a guaranteed box-office winner for those whose faith in him remains unshakeable. And, obviously, there are many still, who believe he can go on for a few years more. A realistic appraisal will reveal that he has cleverly derisked his last few movies by bringing in a fresh crop of stars, heroines, catchy item numbers and adding the regional aura to his venture by including top names from neighbouring film zones other than Bollywood.

In his latest flick, he has a retinue of reel titans – Nagarjuna from Telugu, Upendra from Kannada, Soubin Shahir from Malayalam and Aamir Khan coming up with a cameo from Bollywood. Hindi heroes – Akshay Kumar, Nana Patekar, Nawazuddin Siddiqui and Amitabh Bachchan – were all part of his earlier releases but the fan only wanted ‘his’ superstar to dominate and hog the screen till the end. With such a huge hype and exaggerated expectations and calculations about how its potential at the cash counters would turn out to be, the pre-Independence

Day weekend is to see solid action, with Hrithik Roshan – Jr NTR film ‘War 2’ posing a barrier to the earlier anticipated free run of ‘Coolie’.

With Lokesh Kanagaraj, the hotshot director who has had no failures till now in his decade-long career, the actioner (estimated cost between Rs 350-400 crore) is bound to rake in the moolah to start with, but like all other big budget productions will have to survive vicious social media scrutiny, genuine word-of-mouth feedback and motivated mudslinging to earn its spurs a week later. The toil for the ‘Coolie’ is just about to begin.