Early Life
Rajinikanth was born as Shivaji Rao Gaikwad in a Maratha family, to mother Jijabai and father Ramoji Rao Gaikwad, a police constable, on 12 December 1950 in the Indian city of Bangalore in Mysore State, present-day Karnataka. He was the youngest of four siblings and has two brothers and a sister. After his mother's death when he was five years old, he struggled with an impoverished lifestyle during his childhood. During that time, he often did odd jobs as a coolie in his community. He attended the Government Model Primary School at Gavipuram, Bangalore, where he had his elementary education in Kannada.
Between 1966 and 1973 he worked in many places in Chennai and Bangalore. He performed various jobs before joining the then Bangalore Transport Service (BTS) as a bus conductor. He began to take part in stage plays after Kannada playwright and director Topi Muniappa offered him a chance to act in mythological moral plays. His most notable was that of the villainous Duryodhana. In 1973, his friend and co-worker Raj Bahadur motivated him to join the Madras Film Institute and also financially supported him during this phase. His performance in a stage play eventually caught the eye of film director K. Balachander. The director advised him to learn to speak Tamil, a recommendation that Rajinikanth quickly followed and which proved to be extremely useful in his career.
Read more about this topic: Rajinikanth
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“If you are willing to inconvenience yourself in the name of discipline, the battle is half over. Leave Grandma’s early if the children are acting impossible. Depart the ballpark in the sixth inning if you’ve warned the kids and their behavior is still poor. If we do something like this once, our kids will remember it for a long time.”
—Fred G. Gosman (20th century)
“... when you make it a moral necessity for the young to dabble in all the subjects that the books on the top shelf are written about, you kill two very large birds with one stone: you satisfy precious curiosities, and you make them believe that they know as much about life as people who really know something. If college boys are solemnly advised to listen to lectures on prostitution, they will listen; and who is to blame if some time, in a less moral moment, they profit by their information?”
—Katharine Fullerton Gerould (1879–1944)