That Asin got very little share of the limelight associated with Ghajini’s promotions and posters is true. It did look to be an unjust move to those in the South, for whom Asin is quite a big star. But, in the Hindi Ghajini, she was a debutante and she was opposite, arguably, the biggest star of the industry. If the producers thought that highlighting Aamir Khan’s different get-ups and his hard-acquired six packs would bring in more crowds than anything else, can fault be found with them? Keeping in mind Asin’s wonderful performance in the movie, one still has to admit that it is Aamir’s star power that drove the film to its blockbuster status. Could Asin have been given more space in the posters? Well, that is a question which is very easy to answer in hindsight. The tough thing would have been to make a call before the movie’s release.

Let’s look at a very similar situation in Tamil. Now, there has been no issue surrounding this, no one has brought this up and it has gone unnoticed. In fact, it has little significance. But a comparison to what happened with Ghajini is definitely interesting. It is the case of Naan Kadavul.

Anyone who has seen the pre-release trailers, posters and then the movie will have to admit that there is no balance between them. The trailer shows exclusively Arya and the few minutes that the movie spends in Kasi. Before going into theaters, no one had the slightest inkling that the main plot was something else and that it is the characters that were part of that plot that carried the movie forward. Pooja was one of those characters. Playing a blind beggar, she has given the hardest working performance of her career; the strain that she has undertaken is evident. In fact, it is not wrong to say that she and the real-life beggars onscreen had more footage than Arya. Yet, they did not find a place in the promos or posters until well after the film’s release when public opinion seemed to grow in favor of the real-life beggars’ performance on screen. Pooja, in spite of a potentially award-winning performance, had been sidelined in the posters. No one down south noticed this while Bollywood’s actions in Ghajini were keenly scrutinized.

The point is: does it really matter? Does the amount of space and time given in posters and trailers really determine anything? Does it mean that any one artiste has given a better performance than the other, or does it have the ability to decide the course of an artiste’s career? Time has proved that irrespective of the trailers and promotions, it is what plays out on the big screen that matters. The audience can be influenced only by a movie, not by a two-minute snippet, or a huge hoarding. Our energies will be better used looking at the quality of the role essayed than how much it was hyped.