When it comes to promoting his films, Rocking Star Yash has backed them with a conviction so fierce that promotion becomes personal. Long before curated Instagram drops, global PR machinery, and carefully orchestrated publicity blitzes became the norm, Yash was already rewriting the rulebook by quite literally taking cinema to the streets.
Years ago, he became one of the earliest Kannada actors to travel to the USA to promote Gajakesari, signalling his intent to take regional cinema to a global audience much before it became an industry trend.
Amidst his global promotional spree, the internet has unearthed reminders of where this fearless approach began. An old image from Modalasala (2010) has resurfaced, and it speaks volumes. In the photograph, a casually dressed Yash is seen standing inside a public bus, pamphlets in hand, personally introducing passengers to his film. It’s a snapshot of a time when promotion meant rolling up your sleeves and doing the groundwork yourself.
Equally striking is a video from 2009, now widely shared, which shows a young Yash driving an auto rickshaw across the city to promote Kallara Santhe, turning heads, starting conversations, and making cinema impossible to ignore.
That same instinct followed him as his career scaled new heights. When KGF was taking shape, it was Yash who spearheaded the idea of mounting the film as a pan-India spectacle, envisioning its scale and reach well beyond regional boundaries. He didn’t stop at ideation alone – Yash also took the onus of personally promoting the film across the country, travelling city to city to ensure Kannada cinema announced itself on a national stage with conviction and confidence. At a time when pan-India releases were still the exception, Yash was already doing the legwork, laying the groundwork for what would soon become an industry-wide movement.
And if Yash’s past and present are anything to go by, the future is set to be a spectacle of promotion. Much of the same relentless scale, ambition, and no-holds-barred conviction is now expected from his upcoming projects – Toxic: A Fairytale For Grown-ups and Ramayana, two films that already feel like cultural events in the making.
With Toxic, Yash is set to unveil an edgier avatar—one that promises to redefine the grammar of mass cinema. Meanwhile, Ramayana will see him step into the role of Ravana, carrying the weight of epic storytelling on a scale Indian cinema has rarely attempted. Industry buzz is already pointing towards both projects being strong contenders for the coveted ₹1000-crore club, underlining the unprecedented scale at which they are mounted.
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