If Gayathri Sreekanth undertakes her ophthalmological work with the same callous carelessness as her shoddy biography of Tamil film star Rajinikanth (The Name is Rajinikanth), there must be a lot of unfortunate souls moving about in Chennai with blurred vision, or worse, without any vision.
Besides being a pathetic attempt at hagiography, almost every page in the book The Name is Rajinikanth is riddled with spelling errors, grammatical errors, factual errors or arguments that are sheer nonsense.
As every page in this so-called biography amply attests, Gayathri Sreekanth is a literary bimbette who has no more than a passing acquaintance with the English language. If the task of writing in English was too heavy a cross for this dolt to bear, she should have stuck to Tamil and got the book translated.
Great biographies by authors like Carl Sandburg (Abraham Lincoln), William Manchester (Winston Churchill) and David McCullough (Harry Truman) firmly set their subjects in an age and then weave a fine tale that brings both the age and the individual to life.
Neither Rajinikanth nor his milieu, be it the superstar’s early days in Bangalore, his later years in neighboring Chennai or the Tamil movie industry, come to life Continue Reading…