Google woos Kannadigas with a doodle

Kannadigas woke up on Monday to a pleasant surprise. Google, they discovered, had paid tribute to the late Kannada superstar Dr Rajkumar on his 88th birth anniversary by featuring a special doodle on its search engine.

The doodle image shows Rajkumar on the big screen in a movie theatre with the silhouette of audience watching him.

The doodle is being praised on Indian social media especially because today also happens to be iconic cricketer Sachin Tendulkar’s birthday. There was some grumbling though about why Tendulkar was ignored by Google.

Although #HappyBirthdaySachin remained the most trending topic in India in the morning, people on Twitter seemed appreciative at Google’s fine gesture of remembering Rajkumar.

Some said, the central government failed to recognise Dr Rajkumar’s contribution but Google did not.

Most of the people however were thankful to Google for paying tribute to the actor.

The actor, whose real name was Singanalluru Puttaswamayya Muthuraju, joined the Kannada film industry at the age of eight, and got his first break as a lead in the 1954 film Bedara Kannappa.

He went on to work in over 220 films – Shabdavedhi in 2000 being his last big screen outing.

In his film career, Rajkumar received 11 Karnataka State Film Awards, 10 South Filmfare Awards, two National Film Awards and a National Film Award for Best Playback Singer for song Naadamaya.

He received the NTR National Award in 2002. He was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Mysore and is a recipient of the Padma Bhushan and the Dadasaheb Phalke Award.

He was abducted by the infamous ivory smuggler Veerappan in 2000 and was released after 108 days.

He died on April 12, 2006 at the age of 76.

With PTI inputs