Rajinikanth: Thalaivar Forever is an amazing work of nonfiction that sets out to do something most writing on its subject avoids: to treat Rajinikanth not as a phenomenon to be celebrated, but as an actor to be assessed. Written by T. Sathish and published by one of the country’s leading publishing houses, Om Books International and represented by one of India’s biggest literary agencies, The Book Bakers, the book is part film criticism, part memoir, and part a long, affectionate argument with the reader.

Its premise is simple and, for a fan base used to adulation, mildly provocative. Beneath the sunglasses, the punch dialogues and the cardboard cut-outs washed in milk, Sathish argues, lies a performer whose craft has been obscured by his own stardom. The book travels chronologically from the raw character actor of the 1970s - who played villains and broken men in nearly forty films before fame arrived - to the mass hero of Baasha, Padayappa and Enthiran, pausing at each stage to read the performances closely.