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Till date the powers that be have seemed to buckle when it came to booking wayward Bollywood stars for their misdemeanors. When you have Mumbai’s brand ambassadors to contend with —which authority wants to take on the onus of corrective action? In this scenario Justice Kode should be lauded for resisting Bollywood’s charm offensive. With an emboldened judiciary, is it a case of Sanjay today, Salman tomorrow?
However, all this is not to say that poor misguided Dutt does not have my sympathy at the moment. A call to sister Priya’s cell got me her caller tune on the line: ‘ain’t no sunshine when she’s gone- and she’s always gone too long’, it sang plaintively; a small gender change and it captures the mood of the moment pretty accurately.
Is there any doubt that the medical profession in Mumbai could do with some reform? For every doctor who is dedicated, caring and responsible you have another nine who are mercenary, careless and indifferent. Nandini Sardesai, a noted social activist who lost her husband, the celebrated ex-Test cricketer Dilip recently, to what she says was medical negligence, tells me she is amazed at the number of people with similar tragedies.
“Nine times out of ten when I told people about the pandemonium in the ICU in the last 45 minutes before Dilip’s death, and the carelessness of the doctors in charge, they would tell me of similar stories from their own lives.” The resolute Nandini, who campaigned to win for women an equal status with male members at the Bombay Gym, has now written to the authorities at Bombay Hospital, demanding a full explanation “If such neglect is afforded to a well-known personality — I shudder to think what happens to ordinary folk who put their trust and their lives in such hands.” Time for a medical ombudsman, but, until then, expect a big fight.
How unfortunate that the screening of the documentary Jashn-e-Azadi on the suffering of the Kashmiri people was stopped by the police on the grounds that the film at the Prithvi Theatre would fuel tensions. “If the Mumbai police was so concerned about avoiding tension in the city then surely it has other areas to police,” says the film’s maker Sanjay Kak.
“To come with a DCP, six uniformed cops, six plain-clothed cops, someone from intelligence and a woman constable along with a search warrant, all to seal a film that has been shown extensively around the country is farcical,” he intoned. He’s not willing to say who, but Kak suspects that the police were alerted by a member of the film industry. So much for a united industry.