Chapter-3

CHAPTER 3 : THE MEDIA REACTS

Salman and the Indian media have always been at loggerheads. The actor has been openly critical about the media and have time and again shown defiant attitude towards the industry. Getting into a number of scuffles and fracas, Salman became the gossipmonger and the pungent critic’s delight. Reporters turned opinionators. They seized whatever little chance came their way and their articles ripped apart the actor’s image. As it is people in the society, mediamen and the moral police were fretting and fuming at Salman’s erratic and irresponsible behaviour. At the slightest brawl by Khan, they pounded on the actor and trashed his intentions. Says Subhash K. Jha on sept 30,2002 in rediff, “No one can be blamed for being cynical about Salman's trespasses. It is one thing to err and move on in the first flush of youth. But to continue to behave repeatedly like a brat when you are 36 and then sheepishly ask for forgiveness will hardly work. Today, Salman is largely ostracized by the film industry. Right now, Salman is the most hated man in the film industry.” And there were people all over who bought the argument and agreed to it. Veteran scribe Vir Sanghvi supplements, “Largely as a consequence of the manner in which he is portrayed in the press, he is seen as being a rich, spoilt and successful brat.” He goes on to say that “ His manner is perceived as arrogant and self satisfied.” He also adds, “Given its frustration with our legal system, the middle class wants to see Salman suffer now.” (Vir Sanghvi oct 26,1998 rediff.com). Pritish Nandy openly expresses his disgust for Salman khan but also criticises the role of the Media in this regard. “I find the media’s obsessive hostility towards Salman sick, perverse, grossly unfair. Its not the media’s job to judge anyone.Their job is to present facts and to allow readers to make up their own mind.” He adds that when the actor is in question the media goes overboard criticizing him. He even admits that much of what he reads about him in the press in “plain bilge”. Taking a dig at armchair journalists, Nandy says ‘The man is not a monkey in a cage that you can take a steel tipped umbrella and prod him through the iron bar to see if he really bites.” Film critic and journalist Khalid Mohamed in Rediff.com (September 30, 2002) is more ruthless in his opinion. “Right from the start of his career over a decade-and-a-half ago, he has been mentally unstable, given to impulsive and rash behaviour on various fronts --- in the way he has dealt with the women in his life, the media and above all, with himself. That he has been on a collision course, a self-destructive spree, is a conclusion as simple as adding one and one to make two.” “He is a guy’s guy,” says Mumbai-based film critic Rajeev Masand. “He’s there for you and he wants you to know that. He enjoys his reputation as a 3 am friend and fuels that reputation himself. But there’s clearly a wild side,” he says. (The telegraph 15 April 2003) Sporting an unfazed attitude against the news men, He says “I have always been like this. The media could not make me when I was struggling nor break me when I was successful. I am paying a price for being a part of the film industry. And I don’t mind because I love the industry.” (Bombay Times, according to Biswadeep’s book). For Khan what matters to him the most is his fans’ unconditional support and love. “No matter what the crisis, I was always supported by my fans.” Speaking to Abhishek Mande of network18 on 24 July 2007, he clarifies his victimization by the media. “It's sad that they've got me on this one. I can't react any more. Because if I react to something, they just get more material. Sometimes they really, really piss me off. And there's nothing I can do because that is what their intention is... I react and they get something else out of me. It gets frustrating for me. So they got me. Congratulations.” But Salman Khan, people say, thinks from his heart and does whatever his heart dictates him to. The predicament remains that he attracts a lot of flak most of the times he does that. On repeated instances he his acts have proved to be a wholesome fodder for controversy hungry reporters. Way back in 1999, when Khan was courting Aishwarya, he was reported to have slapped director Subhash Ghai, when the latter spoke some unpleasant stuff about Salman and Aishwarya, while drunk. Reports were also published how Salman roughed up Ranbir Kapoor in a pub and acted macho with Adam Bedi and Aryan Vaid in discotheques. His antics of either ramming his car into Aishwarya’s car from behind on the sets of Chalte Chalte (which led the producer, Shah Rukh Khan to replace the actress with Rani Mukherjee), or emptying a bottle of cold drinks on ex flame Somy Ali’s head in front of a disbelieving crowd in a restaurant in Mumbai, or bashing up reporters catapulted on him very heavily. Delhi-based psychiatrist Sameer Parikh believes that male hormones and socio-cultural conditioning trigger aggression in men. “Expression of aggression could range from verbal abuse to physical fights or speeding on the road to killing other animals for pleasure, depending on an individual bent of mind,” he says. “The expression comes in different ways to different people,” he adds. Most celebrities get away with it, says Parikh, in the lack of a social deterrent. “The irony is that when the system gets back to a celebrity, it gets back very hard,” he says. The telegraph 15 apr 2003.

In an interview to bollywood.allindiasite.com he expresses his disgust for the Indian media – “There were people who said that I should be sent to a mental asylum, that I should be hung… those with the power of the pen, who have now weakened it so much. It is they who should get themselves mentally checked — the ones who have made their powerful pen so weak. They did not even listen to my side. Didn’t want to know my side. Maybe I didn’t want to talk about it. So my silence was taken as being rude, rash, selfish — like I have something to hide. So what defence has Salman Khan for these attacks? “God is with me, nobody can stop me. Nobody.”, he signs off.