Lingaa release and Nobel Laureate losing his speech !

11^th Dec – the day  we remember Mahakavi Subramaniya Barathiyar –  and I had posted photos of his memorial house at Thiruvallikkeni. 

How good a public speaker are you ? and have you faced the conflict of losing the sheet that you carefully prepared for the speech.  Kailash Satyarthi, winner of this year’s Nobel Peace Prize along with Pakistani teenage activist Malala Yousafzai, lost a page of his speech on Wednesday. “Solutions are not found only in the deliberations in conferences and prescriptions from a distance ... Friends, what is missing now of course is my [speech] paper,” he said to peals of laughter in the Oslo City Hall where he received the coveted prize.  As he continued,  a Norwegian official came on stage minutes later  with the missing page of his lecture and Mr. Satyarthi once again had the audience in splits saying, “Thank you so much! I don’t know whether it has happened to some Nobel Laureate before or not.”

The news for cine fans is that Madurai Bench of Madras High Court today  gave the go ahead for release of Rajnikanth's 'Linga' tomorrow with a rider that the producer deposit Rs 10 crore as guarantee since a claim by a director that the film was based on his story is to be settled in a civil court.  The bench gave the direction while declining to entertain an appeal from Director K R Ravi Rathinam, the maker of film "Mullai Vanam 999" against a single judge order dismissing his petition which contended that the storyline of multi-lingual Linga, set to hit the screens on Rajnikanth's 63rd birthday tomorrow, was the same as that of his movie.

Most Rajni films do well commercially and anyway, none is too keen on the story or any other aspect when it comes to Rajni film.  There is news that Lingaa has reportedly been acquired by Eros for Rs 120 crore.  According to a trade source in a leading website, "There are huge numbers already in circulation, and it is a matter of time before the deals are signed on the dotted line. 55-60 crore are all set to come in for the satellite rights of the Tamil and Telugu version.  Telugu theatrical rights are further fetching them 30-35 crore. In addition, the film is being sold overseas for approx. 30 crore just for the Tamil version. In addition to this all, there are music rights which are with Eros."

Sometimes one loses count of zeroes that follow a prime number

With regards – S. Sampathkumar

11^th Dec 2014.