I am Ramakrishna from Bangalore. A regular visitor to your blog. But commenting for the first time today here.

I had read this post after Annavru’s death. Read it again today. One of the best posts after Rajkumar’s death.Have been a fan of DR.RAJ ever since I was a kid.

Kannada Cinema indeed lost an actor non-pareil in the demise of Rajkumar. Very few actors will get the variety of roles that Rajkumar got in his career. And perhaps he was the last hero from the Actor-Singer era. I can hardly think of any hero who won a national award for singing.

After the kidnap saga, not many fans got the opportunity to meet him. But I was extremely fortunate to have met him at his residence just nine months before his death.(In fact, I met him on June 29th 2005. An year since I met him). I spent nearly a couple of hours with him. Having been his fan since childhood, I had collected several pictures of Rajkumar. I showed him the scrapbooks, posters and collages that I had made and got them autographed by the legend himself. He said my collection had more pictures than his own personal albums. He recollected the trivia associated with every picture he saw in my scrapbook.
After my meeting, I realised that Rajkumar was first a gem of a human being. Only then was he a gem of an actor.

ETV Kannada also featured me as a fan of his showing my collection. Nice to know that you are writing a book on RAJKUMAR.

When you find time, do read this post in my blog on Annavru:
http://ramblingwithbellur.blogspot.com/2006/06/hero.html

Good luck to you

I am a big fan of your father.

If there is a person/phenomenon who comes close to characterizing the Kannada ethos, it is Rajkumar! His place in the Kannadigas’ collective consciousness will remain indelible.
I can’t forget my aunt’s die-hard adulation. The only time her traditional orthodoxy took a second place was when the topic touched Rajkumar. She never hesitated in taking a stand against the world if it meant saving Rajkumar from calumny, however small…. That is how his appeal was. Which was beyond reason and reached all classes.
If ever there was somebody, something that could induce some kind of mass-hysteria in this quiet community, the Kannadigas, it is Rajkumar! We’ve lost that shot of stimulus - for good/bad. Now we can go back to our natural dormancy.

I wish we see some soulful, scholarly write-ups — eulogies of some sort — in the general media, befitting Annavaru in the coming days.

m k