From Rs 5000 salary to Rs 100 cr films: How engineer Karthi accidentally found stardom | Tamil News
5 min readHyderabadMay 25, 2026 07:36 PM IST Not many actors can say they once stayed at their office desk until four in the morning, not to rehearse lines, but to finish a design brief for a firm in New York. Karthi can. The man Tamil audiences know from Kaithi and Theeran Adhigaaram Ondru took a road to cinema that went via an engineering college in Chennai, a graduate school in New York, and a Mani Ratnam film set, before it ever led to a camera pointed at his face. After completing his Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from Crescent Engineering College in Chennai, Karthi took up a job as an engineering consultant in the city. The pay was around Rs 5,000 a month and the work felt repetitive. That combination was enough to make him look elsewhere. The money was modest, the routine was dull, and somewhere in that feeling was the push he needed to want something more. What followed was a decision that changed everything, though it did not look like a …
