Rajni is now a management guru

Move aside management gurus; here comes a guru of gurus – Rajnikant. Yes, the Tamil superstar

You have seen him tossing up cigars, bashing up heroes, pirouetting with lasses of his daughter's age, turning into a robot and ringing box office coffers with his histrionics. But at 61, Rajni has taken a new avatar - that of a management guru. Not that he will don the black coat and cap to reach pupils of Harvard or at IIMs, but his one-liners, rather punch lines, are now being used as nuggets to teach students of management a lesson or two.

Rajni's punch lines are famous all across Tamil Nadu - they call it Rajni PUNCHtantra - the one-liners that make villains freeze in their tracks, heroines melt like hot chocolate, animals gallop on mother of jet fuels and send audiences spinning into a tizzy. But now a new book on PUNCHtantras has ascribed management insights into Rajni's one-liners that sometimes can bring down theatre roofs.

The book, Rajini's PUNCHtantra -- Value Statements on Business and Life Management - brought out on Sunday in Chennai to mark Rajinikanth's 61st birthday has some famous one-liners like 'En vazhi thani vazhi' (my way is a unique way) from Padayappa.

The book analyses the 'value statement' and says "One has to be different to succeed. Don't choose a 'me too' line of business or a 'me too' way of running a business. And then comes the example: "Recent history talks of many failures on account of this very herd culture. The failure of many dotcom companies is a typical example."

Here is another PUNCHtantra on similar lines: "Kanna, panni dhan Kootama varum. Singam Singleaa dhaan varum" (Only pigs come in herds. The lion always comes alone) from Sivaji.

Another one-liner packed with Rajni wisdom is Khatam... Khatam... Mudinjathu mudinju potchu from the movie Baba. The book says that this is a typical example to let bygones be bygones. In an analysis of the line, the book says "If history was all that is there to the business game, then the richest corporations will be mere libraries... One reason God created time was so that there would be a place to bury the past."