Before Vijay became a superstar, Chandrasekhar was a film director: “I was directing or producing four movies a year.” His cinema had the stamp of a pedant, and he admits as much. “My films could sometimes be dry, but that was only to make people think,” he says. “I wanted to spread a certain social awareness, because in Tamil Nadu, what people see in the movies, they translate into real life.”
In the last six or seven years, Chandrasekhar has occupied himself so thoroughly with his son’s fandom that he has managed to direct only three movies. “I travel a lot. I’m off to Erode this weekend to donate four computers to a government school, for instance,” he says. “When I go on these projects, I always notice that Vijay’s fans call me appa (Tamil for father) too. Even in the letters he gets, people write in asking: ‘How is our father?’ Not ‘your father,’ but ‘our father’.”
Unlike other heads of rasigar mandrams who shun all political talk for fear that it might be mistaken for the views of their leaders, Chandrasekhar returns repeatedly to the subject. The impression that, over the longer term, he is girding his son’s loins for a political career is inescapable, particularly when people familiar with the filial dynamic say that Vijay does nothing without first consulting his father (“That’s a good thing,” Chandrasekhar says. “It is a sign that you defer to your parents and elders”).
“You know, when Vijay was first applying to kindergarten in various schools, one school asked on the form for his religion, his caste, and so on. For every one of those categories, I simply wrote ‘Indian’,” Chandrasekhar says. “There are parties now for every caste and every religion in India. And that is not a good thing.”
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M ‘SURI’ SURYANARAYANAN
President, All India Chiyan Vikram Fans Welfare Association
The first Vikram movie that Suryanarayanan saw was also the first Vikram movie ever. Back in 1990, when En Kadhal Kanmani released, Suryanarayanan and Vikram were simply friends who had met through their wives, who had studied social work at the same institute. “In his struggling years, he was doing bit roles, and he had a major accident also,” Suryanarayanan says. “Those were tough years.”
M ‘Suri’ Suryanarayanan, President, All India Chiyan Vikram Fans Welfare Association
At the time, Suryanarayanan worked as an office manager for the Minerals and Metals Trading Corp., or MMTC. When Vikram finally attained box-office fame, at the turn of the century, MMTC seemed to be edging towards privatization, and Suryanarayanan was fretting about his job and about the dismal prospect of moving out of Chennai. “At that time, in 2002, Vikram asked me if I would head up his fan association,” he says. “So I took voluntary retirement and jumped right in.”
Out of an office papered with posters and photographs of Vikram, Suryanarayanan manages 16,000 fan clubs in the four southern states, each club with a membership of at least 25. In Chennai alone, there are 4,500 Vikram fan clubs. “There’s no regular fees, just a nominal Rs10 to join,” he says. “Then, when a club does any charity work, or when it puts up banners and posters for a movie release, it does so at its own expense.” The charity work, in the case of Vikram’s mandram, has included sponsoring nearly 50 heart surgeries for children.