The authentic Tamil movie’s story- Hero loves heroine. Heroine loves hero. Hero fights villains. Live happily ever after. This is the formula we all grew up watching. One thing you’ll have to notice is, the hero always falls for the beautiful slim heroine. Recent trends in real and reel life have suggested that age is not an issue to ponder upon. So it really doesn’t matter if the hero is younger to the heroine, as long as they fall in love and keep the audience smiling. Now what is the hitch all about? The height.

Ever seen the Tamil hero fancy a tall heroine? Think, think and the answer is no. Movie makers always have shown the hero as the tall guy and the heroine shorter than him. That’s how it is in the real life, and people claim it – the Asian Height Syndrome, where the Asian male is taller than the female. The same thing continues on the screen. But the ‘beautiful’ heroines we are talking about are tall. The thing to worry about is, they are taller than most of the leading heroes. No pun intended.

Look at one of the recent movies, where the hero plays the father and the son, and he romances his heroine outside India, the director audaciously showed them in the same frame, but the hero emerged winner, as there wasn’t a close up showing both their shoulders. Come on! No hero would dare to accept that.

Similarly, a tall beautiful heroine, who is doing well in the neighbouring Mollywood, ran short of co-artistes to act here. (Co-artistes refer to ‘heroes’) Now what she ran short of were not heroes exactly, but ‘tall’ heroes.

Anything can be excused these days, but not the appearance of the lead pair together. May be the directors can fabricate the story such a way that the heroine is supposedly taller than the hero. But is that possible? Will the fans allow their idol to be shorter? No, our directors are cornered! Hence, a beautiful heroine, couldn’t find her tall heroes, and so she had to go for a make over, and make herself a glamorous heroine. What a pity!

Aggravating this ‘tall girl’ syndrome is import of tall heroines from the other ‘woods’- Tollywood and Bollywood. Adding insults to the injury, heroes are paired with these taller heroines, and if not for their embarrassment, the heroines are just used for the songs rather than enacting dramatic scenes. We are always on the look out to spot the height difference, you see!

‘Everything is fair in Love and War’, and let us include ‘Movies’ now. Anything is acceptable as long as the lead pair – performs. But the die hard Tamil film fan wouldn’t want to see his hero look up (raising his head, we mean) to the heroine, he/she would want it vice-versa. Well… no offence to the ‘short’ guys. May be that’s why they said, ‘Raise your heels’. Just for fun!