Kodiyil Oruvan (transl. One Man in a Crore) is a 2021 Indian bilingual-language political thriller film directed by Ananda Krishnan and produced by Infiniti Film Ventures and Chendur Film International. Simultaneously shot in Tamil and Telugu languages the latter titled as Vijaya Raghavan, it stars Vijay Antony and Aathmika. Vijay Antony also edited the film while the music is composed by Nivas K. Prasanna. In addition, the film was dubbed and released in Kannada, Malayalam and Hindi with the dubbed versions being titled as Vijay Raghavan.
I would like to draw all your attention towards what could be one of the fantastically-put together hero introduction songs in the recent past. I only ask for 20 seconds of your time.
In under 10 minutes in Kodiyil Oruvan, we get a song about the hero with snapshots from his everyday life, that not just spells out for the audience what a gold-hearted and diamond-footed hero Tamil cinema has never seen (duh!), but screams it instead. In Nee Kaanum Kanave, we get a glimpse — and literally so — of Vijaya Raghavan (Vijay Antony), as he goes about his everyday chores on a bicycle. Now the obvious, natural and instinctive question that may arise in your mind is, what’s so markedly different about this song in particular… don’t most of Tamil cinema’s mass narratives have these? The answer is a resounding NO.
Because, in those films, the hero’s good deeds would have mostly been related to the background or we get to hear about his sainthood-ness through lyrics, if you pay attention that is. But in Kodiyil Oruvan, we seemed to have finally found the answer to why Tamil cinema’s mass heroes are good-hearted and diamond-footed.