VISITOR COLUMN

Say you have a penchant for betting on horse races. You are well endowed with money, and you decide to try your hand at the stables.

 

You bet on a horse, luck shines on you, you win a load of cash. You get excited and enticed by it, and indulge more in the betting. You get a string of victories, each victory bigger than the previous one, and you seem to be on a roll. Your cash pile gets bigger and bigger with each victory, and you get more confident about your investments in the betting ring. In the initial stages, these ‘investments’ would have seemed ‘risks’ to you, but no longer. No longer. You feel as if the wind is your breath, and you want all that there is to take.

 

You are gaining from your betting activities. The horse that is helping you in getting rich has been performing well. The hostlers must be doing a good job of grooming the horse. The jockey must in the form of his life. Now, because you are making so much money out of the horse, do you extend your frivolity and let it metastasize into magnanimity by sharing the spoils with those parties? Will you split your money with those entities that were essentially responsible for your victories? Will you?

 

Then all of a sudden, the horse that you bet on fails to rake in the cash. Your investment, which over time has become huge, has gone to waste. What do you do? Do you go try to get your investment back? Will you? More importantly, do you think you will get your money back? Do you think they will give you your money back? Will they?

 

After a rather lengthy detour, I come to the point in hand- the horse canters back to the starting point.

 

Lingaa distributors are demanding compensation for the losses incurred due to Lingaa’s lacklustre performance at the box office. Banking on Superstar Rajinikanth’s market share and K. S. Ravikumar’s reliability has somehow let them down.

 

What seems perplexing is the wishes/demands of these distributors in wanting their money back! I think this problem stemmed from the Superstar himself. After his film Baba did rather average business at the box office way back in 2002, he obliged with the demands of distributors and compensated them for their losses.

 

Having got the carrot once, they have come back for more.

 

Films, like many other things- like horse betting- are investments. Investments essentially are thinly veiled risks. Unless you fully back your bid, your investment will fall flat as a limp, failed risk.

 

The distributors have earned so much from Rajinikanth’s earlier films. K. S. Ravikumar usually churns our mass entertainers that seldom fail to rake in huge sums of money. But as films go, some turn out to be duds at the box office. As a distributor, it is in your job description, nay, it is your responsibility to bear the brunt of failure too.

 

When you are happy enough to drink gaily the fruits of the film crew’s success, why are you reluctant to leave them out in the cold when failure comes calling?