FREE MAN: A High Court has acquitted Salman Khan in the 2002 drunken driving case.

It has been quite a legal coup that Salman Khan has pulled off and the general public is still scratching its head at how it could have happened so suddenly.
A High Court ruled last week that Salman Khan was not guilty of the charge of drunken driving and running over sleeping pavement dwellers in a case that goes back to 2002.
In May this year he had been sentenced to five years imprisonment and that sent shock waves in the industry. There were hundreds of crores of rupees riding on his movies and had he been incarcerated, many Bollywood producers would have been facing enormous financial losses.
But thanks to some of the best lawyers in the country he got bail overnight and didn’t have to spend a single day in jail. What was also surprising was that the appeal process, which usually takes some time, began almost immediately in the High Court.
Most lay people were not even aware that the hearings were happening until they were almost getting concluded. Most people thought it was a given that the conviction would be upheld even if there was some mitigation of the sentence.
But then came the judgment shocking everyone. The court held that it was not proven that Salman was driving, neither could it be said for sure that he was drunk. And that all the witnesses that the prosecution had put forward were not reliable.
Salman, it is said, broke down in court when he heard his acquittal. But there was then the question of who ran over all those pavement dwellers? When the accident happened, there were numerous media reports that more or less took for granted that Salman had been the driver of the accident.
It is true that, as the court held, for someone to be convicted there needs to more than reasonable proof of a his guilt but if the police didn’t provide it then it once again raises questions on how the powerful can manage to manipulate the legal system in India.
People on social networking sites came up with a number of caustic jokes on the verdict, one saying that Salman had a driverless car long before Google thought of its project! The story is not over yet, however. The state can still go in appeal to the Supreme Court against the judgment but that would depend on how vociferous the demand for it will be from the public.
Usually in a case like this there is a lot of public anger but because of Salman’s popularity he might just escape that.

The makeover

Parineeti Chopra has always been plagued by snide comments about her weight. And she was indeed a little overweight as compared to the conventional stereotype of a Bollywood actress. But that has completely changed overnight.
Last week, Parineeti put up a series of photos of herself on Twitter in which she looked more slim and toned that anyone had ever seen her.
It was accompanied by this tweet, ‘THIS IS MY BODY and I’m proud of it! Took me 9 months to look this way. But I’m still work in progress!! Will look better with time :)’
Apparently the images were from a photo shoot that she had been doing and she released them to time with her completion of four years in the industry.
She has had her fair amount of ups and downs but has managed to remain in the A-list in this period. In an interview, she gave out some information on how she managed the transformation of her body — lots of exercise, healthy diet, taking up a martial art form called kalaripayattu and early dinners.

A gory rumour

If the Jiah Khan death does not go into the forgotten pages of Bollywood real life tragedies, it is because of her mother who has relentlessly kept up pressure on the police agencies to keep the investigation going.
Jiah had killed herself and in her suicide note had blamed her boyfriend Sooraj Pancholi for it.
Recently the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), which is conducting the probe, put out a press release on the status of the case saying that he had abetted in the death by driving her to suicide.
Newspaper articles then got hold of the chargesheet, to reveal some shocking facts. Apparently, Jiah had been pregnant during the course of their relationship and had been prescribed some medicines so that there would be an abortion.
The chargesheet quoted a doctor who said he got a call from Sooraj saying that Jiah was bleeding and that the foetus was not coming out. Instead of immediately taking her to a hospital, he did a medical procedure himself with instructions from a doctor over the phone to throw away the foetus.
Apparently, the incident left Jiah traumatised. All this, even if true, does not really make him directly culpable for her death. The clause making abetment of suicide criminal is a controversial one and many feel it shouldn’t be a crime if a person has consciously and of free will decided to take his or her own life.

The whopping fee

Ranbir Kapoor better start pulling some superhits from his bag otherwise there wont be anyone left to pay him the kind of money that he has been getting.
A newspaper recently reported on the fee he had received for Tamasha and it was said to be an enormous Rs38 crore or just under US$6 million.
That would be not such a problem if the movie went on to make Rs100 or 200 crore. Unfortunately that has not been happening. Tamasha is barely counted as a hit and it has so far made over Rs60 crore. This means two-thirds of the collection is just Ranbir’s fee, assuming this news is correct.
The information is said to have become known after an income tax raid on the agency that manages him. No one will, of course, confirm or deny this but the number fits in with the kind of fees top stars charge.
But to keep getting it, they need to bring in three or four times that for the producer. Otherwise, the market will force you to reduce your price according to demand.
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