With Dragon inching toward its June 2027 release and SS Rajamouli’s next film Varanasi already generating conversation, it is easy to forget that both men once had everything to prove. Twenty-four years ago, they were proving it together on a college campus in Visakhapatnam with a budget of Rs 1.8 crore and very little room for error. That film was called Student No. 1. It released in 2001, and neither of them has looked back since.
Koduri Srisaila Sri Rajamouli was born into a family that had been part of Telugu cinema for years. His father, Vijayendra Prasad, is one of Tollywood’s most respected screenwriters. Growing up around the industry gave Rajamouli a feel for it early, but it did not hand him a career. He spent time at AVM recording theatre in Chennai, learning the technical side of production. He then worked under director Kranthi Kumar before landing what became his most important apprenticeship, under veteran director and producer K. Raghavendra Rao, the man who would eventually give him his first real break.
Under Rao’s watch, Rajamouli directed Telugu soap operas on ETV, eventually taking charge of the serial Santhi Nivasam. In 2001, Raghavendra Rao handed Rajamouli a script he had written himself and told him to direct it. The script was Student No. 1 and Rao would supervise the direction. When he arrived on set, he realised he had never operated a crane during all his years of assisting. That willingness to figure things out under pressure, rather than wait until he was ready, has been a thread running through his career ever since.
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The actor and the surname
Jr NTR was born Nandamuri Taraka Rama Rao on May 20, 1983, in Hyderabad. His grandfather, NT Rama Rao, had appeared in over 300 films across a career spanning four decades, founded the Telugu Desam Party in 1982, and served as Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh three times. Within Telugu-speaking households, the name NT Rama Rao carries a weight that is difficult to overstate. It sits at the intersection of cinema, politics, and cultural identity in a way that few names anywhere do.
Growing up as the grandson of that man meant that attention was never the problem. The problem was what came with the attention. Every performance would be measured against the legend and every failure would be amplified. Every success would prompt the question of how much was earned and how much was inherited. However, Student No. 1 was a different ask entirely. This was his first time as the lead of a feature film aimed at a mainstream adult audience, the person the story depended on, the person in every major scene for 148 minutes. He was 18 years old and had never done anything like it before. That both he and Rajamouli were doing something for the first time on the same film is one of the more interesting footnotes in Telugu cinema history. Neither of them had a safety net, they were each other’s.
The film and its story
Student No. 1 is set in a law college in Visakhapatnam. Jr NTR plays Aditya, a young man from Hyderabad who finishes his intermediate studies and wants to pursue engineering, while his father wants him to study law. Before the argument is even resolved, Aditya’s life changes completely. He steps in to stop a goon from assaulting a girl, kills the man unintentionally, is disowned by his father, surrenders to the police, and begins serving a life sentence in Vizag Central Jail.
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The film’s mechanism for getting its protagonist into a college is quietly inventive. Jail authorities grant Aditya special permission to attend the law college as a student. He walks onto campus carrying a secret that nobody around him knows.
The music was composed by MM Keeravani, Rajamouli’s cousin. It was the first of an unbroken run of collaborations between the two that has continued through every Rajamouli film since, up to and including Naatu Naatu, which won the Academy Award for Best Original Song at the 95th Oscars in 2023. The song from Student No. 1 that audiences remembered most was Sakkubai, which became a significant chartbuster in its time.
What the numbers said
Student No. 1 was produced under K. Raghavendra Rao’s banner Swapna Cinema, with C. Aswani Dutt as presenter. It released on September 27, 2001, with 40 prints in circulation, which was a modest release by the standards of bigger Telugu productions at the time.
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Against its Rs 1.8 crore production budget, it earned Rs 22 crore at the box office. It completed 50 days in 73 centres across Andhra Pradesh and ran for 100 days in 42 centres, making it a decent hit in the industry
What came after
Two years after Student No. 1, Rajamouli and Jr NTR returned together for Simhadri, a larger and more ambitious film that became an even bigger commercial success. Simhadri was the first film on which Rajamouli also wrote the screenplay, with his father Vijayendra Prasad providing the story. The partnership continued with Yamadonga in 2007, their third and final collaboration before both men went in different directions for over a decade.
Rajamouli went on to make Magadheera, Eega, and then the Baahubali series, each film larger in scale than the last. Jr NTR rebuilt his career after a difficult stretch in the early 2010s, steadied it with Temper and Janatha Garage, and eventually got the call that brought both of them back to the same set for the first time since Yamadonga.
The duo reunited for RRR, which was released in March 2022. One of the film’s song, Naatu Naatu won the Oscar. The film won the Golden Globe for Best Non-English Language Film. As the accolades piled up, Time magazine named Rajamouli one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2023.
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The distance between Rs 1.8 crore and Rs 550 crore is large enough that it is almost meaningless to state as a comparison. What is worth stating is that the trust built on that Vizag college campus in 2001 survived two decades, several separate careers, and a great deal of change before it produced something the world paid attention to. Student No. 1 was not that thing. But without it, that thing does not exist.
