Objection, my lord! Where are your wig and gavel?

Human emotions ranging from anger to disgust to love, all find place in a courtroom. For most Indians, however, where life has not taken them, Bollywood has. It’s no surprise then that their ideas are based on what Bollywood has fed them over the years.
I must admit that going to court every day as a legal correspondent and watching people bicker over property, rights, honour and,
of course, money can be dreary. But, peppered with Bollywood’s power-packed tareeq pe tareeq lines, it gets transformed into a scene that has the audience gripped. Like Alfred Hitchcock said, “What is drama but life with the dull bits cut out.”

To those fortunate not to have ever visited a real courtroom, I am their live search engine. To a commonly asked question, I steadfastly maintain, “No, no, no! A real judge never ever says ‘order, order’ and has no gavel to bang.” They also do not wear curly wigs or say much more than “objection sustained or overruled.”

In a real court battle, it is nearly impossible to tell the heroes from the villains. Their advocates stand up without thumping the table, wear no sadistic smirks and do not turn around in slow motion to scream, “objection, my lord,” loud enough to stop traffic.

The tear-jerking speech that the hero usually gives after his conviction in a reel court — in which he shouts out that a man is never born a criminal from his maa ki kokh (mother’s womb) and blames halaat aur samaaj (circumstances and society) for it — can even amount to contempt of court.

Bollywood’s “realistic” film-makers may have deliberately kept away from courts as their films would then have taken years to be completed. To quote Mark Twain, “It’s no wonder that truth is stranger than fiction. Fiction has to make sense.”