Rajinikanth has rubbed off on me: Mayur Vyas
Says Mayur Vyas, who is Rajinikanth's voice in his magnum opus, Kabali.
It’s every professor’s deepest wish to have the group he’s addressing pay full attention to him, instead of staring at smartphones, or worse, dozing off! For Usha Pravin Gandhi College’s Mayur Vyas, today marks the day that this wish is fulfilled.
Soon, his voice will be blaring across packed theatres in almost every corner of the country. Not just that, it will also command every ounce of attention from those present, for it will be superstar Rajinikanth himself who will add life to his voice on the screen. Mayur, who will be the voice of Rajini’s Kabali in Hindi, has already lent his voice to the superstar in his last three releases — Lingaa, Robot and Sivaji.
While it clearly is a tall order, the established voice-over artiste, who has Hindi versions of the likes of Ben Stiller and Robert Downey Jr. to his credit, tells us about the challenges of being a voice over artiste and how it was Rajini himself who helped him pull it off. “I still haven’t had the chance to meet him personally,” says Mayur, clarifying that the help he got was not from the man himself, but from the persona. While he hasn’t got the superstar’s feedback yet, he adds that every film he gets of Rajini is an approval from the star for the previous one.
Mayur tells us how he got the opportunity to do Kabali and says, “When I heard that Kabali was happening, I was hoping I would hear from the team. It was then that one of my very close friends, Mohan Nair called me and said that he was doing the Hindi dub of Kabali and wanted me on board. We went to Chennai to meet Pa Ranjith (the director) and the team really liked my voice and I ended up doing the film.”
The challenge, says Mayur is to keep the dialogues, which were originally meant for Tamil, from sounding caricatureish. “If you look at Rajini sir’s original renditions, even his Tamil isn’t authentic. So I decided to focus less on the language and more on the nuances and the style.”
While the superstar himself has dubbed in Hindi for many of his Hindi films in the 80s, (such as Chalbaaz), Mayur adds that his style doesn’t take from Rajini’s Hindi. “I tried to take from Chalbaaz, but even there the Hindi he speaks is heavily accented and it becomes caricature-ish. I didn’t want that to be the case because here as Rajini is the hero and he needs to be taken seriously.”