The 8th of April, or Allu Arjun’s birthday, is no ordinary day for Thiruvananthapuram-based Prabhu VR. Born in the same year as his favourite Telugu superstar, Prabhu was coordinating a State-wide charitable exercise to provide meals to old-age homes, and sweets to orphanages across all of Kerala’s 14 districts, when we spoke to him over a phone call. This may sound logistically complex but it’s also something Prabhu has been doing ever since he co-founded the All Kerala Stylish Star Allu Arjun Fans & Welfare Association or the AFWA, way back in 2006. Prabhu is someone you may call an OG fan of Allu’s, that rare Malayali fanboy who started following the star even before his films got dubbed into Malayalam.
“Vijith, a friend of mine was working in Hyderabad in the 2000s,” begins Prabhu recalling that phase. “Even before we had heard of Allu Arjun, Vijith kept talking to me about this new star who was also related to Megastar Chiranjeevi, so when I visited him in Hyderabad, he took me along to watch his movies. Even though I could not follow the language, there was something that drew me strongly to Allu Arjun. It may have been his dance moves, his style or his fashion, but I could see something other Malayalis would discover soon.”
This was exactly what distributor Khader Hassan too saw in Allu Arjun, urging him to bring the star’s film to Kerala. He had watched the star’s songs and his trailers on a trip to Hyderabad and he bought the rights for Arya (2004) and decided to dub it in Malayalam. For he saw in Allu Arjun, traces of his uncle Chiranjeevi and the Tamil superstar Vijay. Both of them had created a fan base in Kerala and they were both great dancers. It was a reasonably safe bet to take. He says, “It was a film with that totality. It had great songs and it had all the elements that made it larger than the realistic, serious films of Malayalam then.”
