Ladaai!

Inspite of Rajni and Kamal being considered professional rivals for the better part of their careers, they have been extremely cordial off-screen and have never missed a chance to stress their friendship (its easy finding clues to their lack of rivalry in Rajni movies since he makes numerous references to Kamal. Chandramukhi, for instance, opened with a 'Thanks' to Padmasree Kamalhassan while Rajni referred to Kamal directly in movies like Muthu and Sivaji). Though our younger actors frequently refer to Rajni and Kamal as their role models, they did not follow their behavior off-screen and waged a proxy war on each other through their movies not too long ago. Vijay and Ajith routinely took digs at each other in their movies like Tirumalai and Attagaasam while even a younger actor like Simbhu taunted rival Dhanush with some not-so-subtle potshots in Manmadhan. Personal attacks onscreen cheer up an actor's hardcore fans since they frequently equate professional and personal rivalry. But to the larger audience, they just make the actor look cheap and label him as someone who would stoop to any level to strike a few cheap shots.

Thankfully, that phase seems to have ended. Vijay and Ajith have made appearances in functions together, as have Simbhu and Dhanush, and the veiled attacks at one another through movies has also stopped since I didn't notice any pointed dialogs in movies like Kuruvi, Billa, Azhagiya Thamizh Magan, Kireedam or the movies before that.

The enmity seems to have travelled North to Mumbai though and unlike the wars of words waged by our Tamil actors, the war in Bollywood seems a lot more mean-spirited since it is all personal. Recently, I've been reading a lot about some cheap, childish bickering among the top Bollywood stars. The earliest one I remember was a war of words between Amitabh and Aamir Khan, after the latter confessed to not liking the former's Black all that much. Amitabh took that personally and minced no words in his response, telling Aamir that the film probably went over his head. Lately, Amitabh has trained his guns on Shah Rukh, who succeeded him as host of Kaun Banega Crorepati, and questioned the low ratings for that show as well as for Shah Rukh's latest gameshow, Paanchvi Paas.

Lately, blogging seems to be the latest fad for the stars and they've turned their blogs into places to rant. The latest controversy had Aamir write about "Shahrukh licking his feet and being fed biscuits" before he revealed that it was his dog that was named Shahrukh. He did have an explanation about the dog belonging to his house's previous owners and being named by them but the order of the lines left us in no doubt as to his mischievous intent. Amitabh, for his part, drafted an open letter to critic Khalid Mohammad, who had an unflattering review of Amitabh's latest film Bhoothnath as well as the actor's performance in it, and stooped to pretty low levels as he criticized Khalid's track record and made fun of his name.

Though the quality of our movies has a taken a precipitous dip and lags behind the quality of Hindi films, Tamil cinema and its actors seem to better off than their Bollywood counterparts as far as civility and decency amongst our actors goes. Guess we can look at that as the silver lining...