Fan project · 19 October 2026
I built a Rajinikanth app. It's called Thalaivar.
தலைவர்
Jailer 2 is out, and I've been a Rajini fan for as long as I can remember. So I built the app I always wanted: every film, his life story and the interviews, in one place, in English and Tamil, with every fact tied to its source.
Why
There's no shortage of Rajini content online. What I couldn't find was one place that had it all and told you where each fact came from. Which film was his first? What happened on the sets of Baashha? How did a bus conductor from Bangalore get the name Rajinikanth? The answers are out there, in biographies, old interviews and newspaper archives, but scattered.
So Thalaivar is built like a reference book you can carry. Every story, every date and every credit points at its source, and the sources are a tap away. If something is wrong, you can tell me from inside the app and I'll fix it.
What's inside
- All 190 films, back to Apoorva Raagangal in 1975: by decade, by language, and whether it was a full role or a cameo.
- His life as a timeline, from Bangalore bus conductor to superstar, plus ten biography chapters.
- 44 stories from the sets and 16 interviews with the people who were there.
- Everything in English and Tamil. Switch any time.
- Every statement shows its sources, one tap away. Spot a mistake? There's a button to report it.
- An “on this day” card. On launch day it was 47 years since Annai Oru Aalayam.
- No sign-in, no purchases, no tracking.
A look around
Swipe through. The last two are the same screens in Tamil.
Discover: what's coming up, and his films by decade
A story, with its seven sources one tap away
His life as a timeline
A film page: Baashha, 1995
All 190 films, with filters
Search across films, stories, the timeline and interviews
The same story in Tamil
Discover in Tamil
The honest bits
Thalaivar is an independent fan app. It is not endorsed by Rajinikanth, any film studio or any publisher. The films and the man belong to their makers; the app is just my way of organising my admiration.
The Tamil text is still being checked by a Tamil reader, so you may find a clumsy sentence or two. The report button in the app is the quickest way to tell me.
It's published through Digitalgrub's developer accounts, because that's where my store accounts live. The app itself is a personal project.
How it's built
One Flutter app for iPhone and Android. Behind it, a Laravel backend on Postgres, with an editorial panel for reviewing and publishing every film, story and translation. The research went in as batches of sourced claims, so the sources sheet in the app is real, not decoration.