Chennai: One of India’s finest actors Dhanush has now substantiated his earlier claim of how his siblings and he used to collect flowers from the fields when they were children to earn money to buy idlis.
It may be recalled that during the audio launch event of the film, which was held at the Nehru Indoor stadium in the city, Dhanush had explained how when he was a kid, his siblings and he used to collect flowers from the fields for over two and a half hours to earn a few pennies with which they would then buys idlis.
While his disclosure moved many fans, a few trolls on social media raised doubts about the claim, saying it was hard to believe that the son of a popular director (Dhanush’s father Kasturi Raja is a well known Tamil film director) had to work in the fields to save money to buy idlis.
When Dhanush was asked about this at a pre-release event of his upcoming film Idli Kadai, the actor explained, “I was born in the year 1983. My dad turned a director in the year 1991. So, those eight years, we were in poverty. Even after he turned a director in 1991, he had the responsibility of taking care of four children. He had to provide schooling for all of us and take care of us. During 1994 – 1995, it became okay. We started having a good lifestyle. However, when you are young, if you go ask your elders for money, they won’t immediately give it. This is especially true in households that run on a budget. My siblings and I (four of us) were children who understood the situation at home. We wouldn’t want to be a burden to our parents. So, even if we asked, we wouldn’t get money and we wouldn’t ask also. Therefore, we worked in the fields, earned money and bought idlis with it.”
During the audio launch event, Dhanush had disclosed that the idea to make a film around the ‘Idli Kadai’ (Idli shop) had occurred to him when he had gone abroad.
Dhanush had said, “I had gone abroad along with Shreyas and Ashwath for a meeting. After the meeting, they went out while I returned to my room. I was alone in my room. Like everybody else, when I am alone, I have Ilaiyaraaja’s songs for company. Some songs have the power to transport you to a different time and place. They tend to rekindle old memories. I was listening to an Ilaiyaraaja song called, ‘Naan erikaarai…’ which reminded me of a time when my mom would take me to her native village for my summer vacation. It was a small village. Only two buses would come and go. There was one shop and it was an idli shop. I wanted to eat at that shop. However, I would not have money.”
The actor then went on to explain what his siblings and he did to earn money.
“In our village, if we plucked flowers from the fields and gave the owners, we would be paid according to the amount of flowers we had collected. So, my two sisters and cousins and I would wake up at four in the morning and go to the fields to pluck flowers. We would work non-stop for around two-and-a-half hours. If we worked that hard, each kid would get around Rs Two or Two-and-a-half Rupees. We kids would then go to a field and have a bath at the water tank there. Drying ourselves, we would go to this Idli shop and have four to five idlis. Today, I have eaten in famous and restaurants. But I have never been able to get the same happiness, the taste, the peace we got when we ate those idlis bought with hard earned money,” he explained.
For the unaware, Dawn Pictures, which is one of the production houses producing the film, had initially announced that the film would hit screens worldwide on April 10 this year. However, they chose to postpone the release to October 1.
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