After having told the lives of people he knows, Selvaraghavan has moved into unfamiliar territory -- the Chennai underworld. Though not as extensive or powerful as the Mumbai underworld, it exists.
Pudupettai, the story of a man involved in murder, comes with the tag line 'Survival of the Fittest'. Dhanush, who has not had a hit for a long time, is the hero. In his undernourished, famished look, he looks extremely vulnerable in the film.
What Selvaraghavan wanted was to peep into the mind of an assassin. No other director, not even Balu Mahendra, has yet exploited the powerhouse of talent Dhanush has within him, as his brother has done.
The kind of expectations people, especially youngsters, have from Pudupettai is evident from a poll conducted by a Tamil magazine in campuses. Selvaraghavan is the most talented Tamil director, according to the poll, rated above Mani Ratnam and Shankar. Naturally, he is a very tense man these days. He says he would rather be a shepherd in Switzerland, walking around with a herd of sheep with nothing to worry about!