Sandeep Reddy Vanga gave us Arjun Reddy and years later, Animal. Both films are about brooding men who treat love like an inconvenience until it hits them. As it turns out, the casting wasn’t a coincidence. Vijay Deverakonda and Ranbir Kapoor are the same man, just in different pin codes.
Vijay’s recent appearance with wife and actor Rashmika Mandanna on Koffee With Karan makes the similarity difficult to ignore. There was nonchalance in how Vijay made Rashmika ask him about marriage a hundred times. The insistence to put the relationship through repeated manufactured tests as an attempt to protect himself from getting hurt, is odd to say the least. Somewhere between the confession and the shrug, you could almost hear a Ranbir Kapoor playing in the background.
The half-smile, the calculated indifference, the ‘I’m just a chill guy’ act — it is as feeble an attempt at charm as it is infuriating. For these men, emotional unavailability is a personality trait.
During KWK, Vijay admitted that in his earlier interviews, he had spoken about love “with disrespect and disbelief”. His ambition, he said, had clouded his judgment for years. If something did not contribute to his career, money or personal growth, he saw it as a distraction that needed to be eliminated. But when he met Rashmika, Vijay said he wanted her around because his days felt better, his meals were more enjoyable, and he slept better with her beside him. Eventually, he realised he wanted to marry her.
Vijay blurred the lines between being in love and having a technical support system in the form of a woman. Mr Deverakonda, Rashmika is your wife, not your mother. Even when Vijay won the rapid fire round hamper, and Rashmika asked whether he would share it with her, he quipped, “If there are any feminine products.” What was Vijay expecting, sanitary pads?
Tone-deaf philosophy
Ranbir, too, has had his share of public scrutiny over the way he talks about Alia Bhatt in public. In 2022, during a promotional livestream for Brahmastra, he interrupted Alia while she was discussing the film’s promotions and joked, while pointing towards her pregnant belly, that she had “phailod”, which loosely translates to “expanded”.
This followed Alia revealing in an interview about how Ranbir would ask her to wipe off her lipstick as he preferred the natural colour of her lips. He even asked her to keep her pitch low. Yet Alia always tried to position him as an intellectual, who doesn’t like to badmouth anyone. It’s only ironical that Ranbir has earned the tag of the best gossiper in the Kapoor family, and perhaps the entire Bollywood.
Both men, at least in their public personas, desperately want to appear complicated, layered and philosophical about their approach towards relationships. But, unfortunately, they sound ignorant and tone-deaf. Neither realises what his jokes or casual remarks could mean to the millions of women watching it.
Vijay and Ranbir come from very different backgrounds. Ranbir is a third-generation Bollywood actor, born into one of Hindi cinema’s most influential families. Vijay, on the other hand, built his career as an outsider to the dynasties of the Telugu film industry. His father was an ad film director.
But this comparison is not about privilege or career trajectories. It is about the performance of nonchalance, the carefully cultivated impression that nothing matters too much, even when the woman in question clearly does.
And yet, both relationships have reached marriage. Vijay and Rashmika married in Udaipur on February 26, and by every account she knew exactly who she was marrying. Alia knew too. And, maybe that’s the real similarity.
Both men found women with the stamina of marathon runners and the emotional intelligence of therapists. So, it is safe to say, fortunately or unfortunately, Vijay Deverakonda is the Ranbir Kapoor of the South.
(Edited by Aakriti Handa)
Women’s desires are women’s issue. Why should men get involved in that?
Do us women pay heed to ‘men’s desires’? Or are we expected to pay heed to ‘men’s desires’?
And nothing in Arjun Reddy or Animal was ‘regressive’. If it did not fit the standards of feminists like you, that’s your problem. Not the film director’s or the actor’s.