For Me, Writing is Cathartic

Author and filmmaker Aishwaryaa Rajinikanth Dhanush on creating her own path while growing up in a celebrity household.

- Chumki Bharadwaj

How far can the apple fall from the tree? No, this wasn’t a metaphysical question or an existential one; only the first thought that crossed the mind when I saw Aishwaryaa Rajinikanth Dhanush. With an elfin frame and enormous eyes that simply consume her delicate face, she is gentle, soft-spoken to a fault and almost nervous, tripping over her own trappings in a shoe box of a room at a suburban hotel. In Delhi to promote her debut book, Standing on an Apple Box, she bears no resemblance, physical or otherwise to her supernova father, movie icon Rajinikanth, 66, whose megastar status in Tamil cinema (over 150 films) has remained unshaken since the 70s. His larger than life persona has made him a post-modern phenomenon in South Indian cinema, earning him the moniker ‘Thalaiva’ or leader, and inspiring among many firsts, a new genre for jokes as well.

Born to fame and married to popular Tamil actor, director, producer, playback singer and lyricist Dhanush, she is cine royalty like few others. So it falls to reason that hers would be a story worth telling. The book threads together vignettes of her extraordinary life, in a very “ordinary household”, she insists. Her mother, Latha Rajinikanth, was very particular about shielding her children from the pomposity of public persona and took extreme measures to give them “as normal a life as possible”, she says.

The book, much like her, is earthy, simple and sincere, a heartfelt attempt to deconstruct the life of a celebrity child, woven together like a diary of memory sequences, much like you would expect in a movie that plays out through a series of flashbacks.