The photograph says more than a thousand words. Displayed on the front page of a national paper on Wednesday, May 6, it shows Salman Khan coming out of Mumbai airport. As you would expect, he is surrounded by a gaggle(group,झुण्ड) of people, some of them obviously his bodyguards, others struggling to keep up and get themselves into the frame of waiting photographers. What is striking about the picture is Khan’s body language: he is striding(walk with long step,लंबे डग) confidently forward, wearing the celebrity’s ever-present sunglasses, stomach in, chest out, muscles straining at the tight tee shirt. This is a hero with a capital H, the superstar who looks like a superstar.
Looking at the picture, you wouldn’t think he was striding to his doom, for Wednesday, May 6, was the day designated as his sentencing day, 13 years after the Land Cruiser he was driving (rashly and in a drunken state according to the prosecution), left the road, climbed a pavement, and crashed into a group of sleeping men, one of whom lay dying under the wheels of the car, while four others lay scattered(disperse,बिखरा हुआ), grievously(critical,गंभीर) injured. Then, according to eye-witnesses, the macho man of Bollywood, shown in ads flicking the cap off a bottle with just his thumb while dangerously aloft in mid-air, the Salman Khan who would later star as the supercop of Dabangg, stood paralysed into inaction, then fled from the scene, leaving the dying and the maimed(wounded,आहत) to wail alone.
That single act of cowardice would have been enough to damn(blamed,आलोचना) him in the eyes of the law, but (advised, no doubt, by an inept team of lawyers), he came up almost literally at the last minute with the story that the family driver, and not he, Salman Khan, was at the wheel. Letting a poor employee take the rap for you — is that what superheroes do to save their skins?
This, and similar other improbable(unlikely,विचित्र) stories concocted(make,बनाना) by the defence team, no doubt had the unintended effect of enhancing his jail term; unbelievably, none of this had any effect on his huge army of fans. For them, the Salman Khan who ran away from real life action, the Salman Khan who hid behind his driver... this persona didn’t exist; for them their Salman Khan was still the macho man of Dabangg and other movies. The world of make-believe had completely overtaken the real world.
The other notable reaction to the five-year jail term was from Khan’s Bollywood fraternity. To a man (and woman), they expressed their solidarity with him. A couple went so far as to suggest that the victims were to blame for the accident: “Why on earth were they sleeping on the pavement?” they asked angrily. Most others reacted with anguish(hurt,दुःख), the common thread in their tweets emphasising Salman Khan’s large- heartedness, his generosity, his charitable work, his niceness.
The callousness(insensibility,निष्तुरता) of abandoning(give up,छोड़ देना) dying men was forgotten; so was the man who shot endangered species like black buck; and, even more surprising, because these were people of their own kind, was forgotten the man who not so long ago was said to have assaulted his girlfriends.
So, then, do we just see what we want to see? And if we are so selective about our view of others, can we blame an individual if he has a selective view of himself? Can we blame Salman Khan, showered as he is by the blind love of his fans and the undemanding affection of his friends and colleagues, for believing that he himself is the salt of the earth, without any blemish really, and so completely undeserving of the harshness of the sentence imposed on him?
Or does he, deep inside, know that he has, more than once, erred really badly, and that is why in a subconscious moment of self-realisation he called his clothing line for charity ‘Being Human’?
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