LEGAL TROUBLES: The verdict in Salman Khan’s hit-and-run case is to come out on May 6.


The saga of the Salman Khan case that began in 2002 when his vehicle ran over sleeping pavement dwellers is finally coming to a close. The hearings have been completed and on May 6, the judge will rule whether he is guilty.
If it is indeed held that Salman was at the wheel when the incident occurred and that he was drunk, then he is looking at a long prison term. For his producers that might spell disaster because he is currently at the top of his career and there are literally hundreds of crores riding on him.
On the other hand, thanks to the slow legal system of the country, Salman will still be able to appeal any conviction and could manage to stay out of jail for a few years more until the higher courts decide on it.
But it is still a tense moment for the movie industry. And it just became a little more difficult because now there is another old case of Salman that has cropped up. This is an illegal poaching case he was embroiled in 1998 in Rajasthan during the shooting of Hum Saath Saath Hain.
A court in Jodhpur has summoned him in person to record his statement. He was supposed to be there last week but didn’t go citing an ear ailment. The court has now asked him to be present on April 29. Incidentally, a shoot of Salman’s in Kashmir also had to be cancelled for two days because he was unwell. But he is now said to be shooting again even though in pain.
His sister Arpita tweeted about it saying that he was ‘under the weather hopefully will bounce back soon.’ It might be increasingly difficult to bounce back with so many legal issues chasing Salman relentlessly.



Confirmed to hitch


Turns out the rumours may have been true after all — Shahid Kapoor is going to marry but there is only small change. While the gossip earlier was that he would be doing so in December, the date has apparently been pushed forward to June.
The girl in question, Mira Rajput, does not belong to the film fraternity and is in fact just a college student. The news of their relationship had been secret until it got leaked recently along with the marriage plans. The director of a movie Shahid is working in confirmed the date.
He told a newspaper that his movie’s shooting was scheduled for June but would now have to be postponed because Shahid had informed them that he was getting married during that time.
A number of reasons are speculated for the haste in which the marriage is being done. One is that the family of the girl does not want the exposure now that the news of the relationship is out. The other is that Shahid has a number of projects happening in the December period and won’t get too much time for a post-wedding vacation together.
But in any case Shahid has been true to his word when he said in a chat show some time back that he would never be in a relationship with someone in Bollywood again.

No beach privacy

It is quite intriguing how Ranbir Kapoor and Katrina Kaif manage to so successfully evade the photographers in Mumbai where they have been courting for such a long time but when they step out onto a beach in a foreign country, they always come under the lens.
That was how they were caught on a beach in Spain two years ago. Katrina was wearing a bikini and Ranbir beach shorts — both had reacted angrily to the pictures as invasion of their privacy.
But now it seems like deja vu because they have once again been photographed together on a vacation to a beach destination. Thankfully, this time both of them were appropriately attired and all that the photos showed were them getting out of the airport in Maldives.
There are beaches there but you can be certain with these photos going viral online no one with even a phone camera will be allowed near the couple now. But then, as Deepika Padukone commented after the Spain incident, these are just the things that come along with being a celebrity and there is really no reason to be overly upset about it.


Bad ad

It was just some days back that Aishwarya Rai and Abhishek Bachchan celebrated eight years of being together. And how time has passed so quickly for them. When they married both were at the peak of their careers, Aishwarya firmly the most sought after heroine in Bollywood and Abhishek still a saleable actor.
They had just finished a movie together, Mani Ratnam’s Guru, which had been fairly well received. Abhishek would continue his run of flops with an intermittent hit but he was still an A-list actor with no dearth of demand. It was marriage that no one outside their immediate circle had foreseen but it was an unqualified success.
And now both of them are nowhere near the top of the game in Bollywood. Sure, Aishwarya is planning a comeback but at this age — she is 41 — it is almost impossible to command the kind of stature she used to.
But she still can manage to rake up a storm, as has happened with what seems to be a rather innocuous advertisement. This was of a jewellery company that she endorses. The image in the advertisement is of an Aishwarya dressed in a regal fashion and decked in jewellery. Behind is a little dark coloured boy holding an umbrella over her. There didn’t seem anything really wrong with the image but then some activists began to say that it encouraged child labour.
Soon the media picked it up and there was bad press coming Aishwarya’s way. The company decided to drop the advertisement and Aishwarya also went into damage control. Her publicist released a photo in which Aishwarya is sitting in a grey and black background and said that this was the original image and the boy had been photoshopped onto it without Aishwarya’s knowledge, thus putting her in the clear.

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