Yash: The Rocking Ravana

He does the shiva tandava with exceptional fluidity, confers with his nine other heads on whether he should forgive or fight to avenge his sister Surpanakha’s humiliation, and glowers at Sita when he kidnaps her in the Pushpaka Vimana. Nothing Yash does as Ravana in the latest movie version of Ramayana is expected. But then not every conventional action hero would be so keen to inhabit the skin of the antagonist of one of our greatest epics.

There is very little that is ordinary about Yash, who has been given the moniker ‘Rocking Star’, and who was born Naveen Kumar Gowda. Like his Rocky in KGF, Yash has pulled himself up by his bootstraps. The son of a government bus driver, he has taken the long and winding road to stardom, from a backstage boy in theatre to a serial staple in television to becoming Kannada cinema’s foremost star.

Yash’s dreams have never been small, nor has his ability to take risks. He lives and breathes cinema, trusting his gut instinct. His journey has led him from the combined box-office success of KGF: Chapter 1 and KGF: Chapter 2 (Rs 1,500 crore) to Toxic: A Fairy Tale for Grown-Ups, a massive drama with an indie director from Malayalam cinema, Geetu Mohandas. Toxic’s failure was as spectacularly deranged as its screenplay, even as Yash aced the menace and madness of his twin roles, mafia boss Raya and his son/alter ego, Ticket.

In many ways, Yash was born to play Ravana, a character defined by his flaws rather than his extraordinary powers. He does not see cinema purely as a business, and he values experience over success. He has global ambitions, and he has the requisite emotional intelligence and dramatic physicality to achieve them. Even if he doesn’t, he is building a body of work that will be remembered for its outrageousness and courage.