As actor Vijay rises to political superstardom, netizens can't help but feel sorry for the Rajinikanth-Chiranjeevi duo. They were expected to be the MGR-NTR duo of their generation.
Rajinikanth is timid, fickle-minded, and the best political stunt he has ever been able to pull off are cryptic meta lines in his movies like Narasimha and Baba. In 2018, he announced a political entry and did a U-Turn within days. The bus is well past him now. He should spend the rest of his active life doing movies - good ones, bad ones and ugly ones (given the standard of today's Kollywood filmmakers, he will get to do only a few good movies).
Chiranjeevi's PRP polled a very good vote share in 2009 AP Assembly elections. The VS to seat-share conversion ratio was poor, though. The young party won in 18 seats but it secured the second position in 47 constituencies. That was huge. For whatever reason, Chiru retreated politically by joining the Congress party two years later. Had he held his ground, his brother wouldn't have become a political stalwart in due course of time, as the Kapu caste-based vote would have split in Chiru's favour.
To be fair to Rajini, he was not destined to have it easy. Chiru had a ready-made caste base. Kapus saw him as a potential trailblazer from their community. Rajini doesn't have such a strong base. This is one of the main reasons he dilly-dallied for many years before finally saying sorry. Even so, he stood a great chance in the mid-1990s when his film career was at its peak. Like Vijay, he should have told voters that he was renouncing his cinema career to serve the public.
In 2026, both Rajinikanth and Chiranjeevi are just actors. On a day Vijay has scripted history, Tamils are sorry for Rajini and Telugus, for Chiranjeevi.
