“She wondered what would become of the boy she raised so lovingly,” Manikandan recalls. She would defend him to the world and weep at home. When he finally made a name for himself in films, the one person who was happiest was probably Manikandan’s mother, the lady who backed her son even when the world ridiculed the fact that her engineering graduate son was ‘jobless’, in their dictionary. Ironically, he would one day go on to act with Rajinikanth (in Pa Ranjith’s Kaala, as his son), whose voice he had mimicked numerous times on stage and for friends. He’s also been a part of some well-made television series and has also done a whole lot of mimicry. As was the villainous cockroach in Insectibles. Remember the father in the Tamil dubbed version of 102 Dalmatians? That was Manikandan. I smiled and said thanks,” says Manikandan, also an intuitive voice actor. What he said kept alive my creative fire. “I did wonder if I should tell him what he once thought of me, and then thought it was pointless.
Years later, the same person, forgetting that this new actor making waves had once met him and had been swatted like a fly, told him he was doing a good job. Just once in an hour-long conversation, he recalls a man comparing his face to “something I don’t want to think about now”. His career in Tamil has been nothing short of a struggle, yet there’s hardly a trace of bitterness or anger at anyone who treated him badly. He’s also a wonderful writer, and his lines made some scenes in Vikram Vedha sparkle.
Manikandan has been Tamil cinema’s everyman for some years now, choosing roles that no one would (a man who survives cancer with a testicle less and manages to find love, in Halitha Shameem’s Sillu Karupatti, the man who does not want to attend his father’s funeral in Shameem’s Aaley, in a film culture where amma and appa paasam (affection) is sacrosanct, and the young cop corrupted early on in Vikram Vedha).
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