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Ponniyin Selvan 2 set for April release
The movie will release in Tamil, Telugu, Hindi, Malayalam and Kannada on April 28
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Supriya Singh - Sat, 01, Apr 2023
- 16:35 EDT
- 574
The much-awaited sequel of Mani Ratnam’s Ponniyin Selvan 1 will be released worldwide on April 28. The trailer of the film was released on March 29 during a star-studded event at Nehru Indoor Stadium in Chennai.
Based on author Kalki Krishnamurthy's novel, PS-1 released in 2022, was a roaring success and went on to become the fourth highest-grosser of Tamil films of all time.
Music of the upcoming film has also been composed by Oscar winner Maestro A.R. Rahman. The audio was also launched along with the trailer  during the same event in Chennai.  ‌‌‌‌The producers of the film, Lyca Productions and Lyca Talkies, revealed a new poster--featuring lead actors Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, Chiyaan Vikram, Karthi, Jayam Ravi, Trisha Krishnan and Aishwarya Lekshmi to promote the film.
Other prominent actors include Prakash Raj, Trisha Krishnan, Aishwarya Lekshmi, R. Sarathkumar, Parthiban, Jayaram, Prabhu and Sobhita Dhulipala.
Ponniyin Selvan 1 ended on a cliffhanger with revered warrior Vallavaraiyan Vandiyadevan (Karthi) and the heir to the Chola empire Arulmozhi Varman (Ravi), jumping to death and presumed to have drowned when Oomai Rani, the older lookalike of Nandini, evil Queen of Pazhuvoor (Bachchan) swam to rescue them.
An Indian-American Foreign Service officer has alleged that systemic fraud in India has compromised the H-1B visa program for almost twenty years, asserting that the issue remains unresolved despite repeated escalation to Washington.
Speaking on Nov. 20 in a personal capacity on the Center for Immigration Studies’ “Parsing Immigration Policy” podcast in conversation with the host Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies, Mahvash Siddiqui said she documented “industrialized fraud” while adjudicating more than 51,000 H-1B applications at the U.S. Consulate in Chennai between 2005 and 2007.
Also Read: Rising visa fees put immigrant doctors at risk, scholar warns
“Visa fraud is normalized in India,” said Siddiqui, who was part of a small task force to curb visa fraud at the embassy. She highlighted that 80–90 percent of the cases she reviewed involved forged documents, fabricated degrees, or unqualified applicants.
She cited proxy interviews, falsified certificates, and a document-forgery pipeline in Hyderabad’s Ameerpet district. On the U.S. side, she also described kickback systems in U.S.-based teams, which were usually Indian-heavy managers that directed jobs to specific candidates.
The Chennai consulate has remained a high-volume hub. In fiscal year 2024, it processed roughly 220,000 H-1B visas and 140,000 H-4 dependent visas, more than any other post worldwide.
Siddiqui said that efforts by her task force to run targeted anti-fraud checks were shut down after being labeled a “rogue operation,” due to political pressure from the top. “
It was so systemic. It was very hard for our little task force of, you know, 15 or so Foreign Service officers to basically speak truth to power.”
A new CIS report released alongside the interview, “‘Industrialized’ Fraud in the H-1B Visa Program,” argues that the abuses Siddiqui described remain pervasive. The report states, “The H-1B invasion threatens American jobs, security, and prosperity,” asserting that fraud enables outsourcing firms to replace U.S. STEM graduates with lower-wage foreign workers.
Siddiqui said the program no longer meets its original goal of addressing genuine skill shortages, adding that it “contributes to bypassing local talent” and calling the notion of a persistent American STEM shortage a “myth.”
“I'm from Southern California, and I've seen how these very smart students came out of the University of California system, a very robust STEM education, and yet they have been displaced by these IT workers from India,” she asserted.
As Congress and the incoming administration prepare to reassess H-1B rules amid tech-sector layoffs and rising unemployment among STEM graduates, Siddiqui’s account—nearly two decades after her Chennai posting—adds urgency to calls for major reform or a full structural overhaul of the program.
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