There is a YouTube video of Govinda doing a dance of sorts at a movie set when he was a star many years ago. He is dressed in his trademark loud attire, in this case a patterned white jacket and dark glasses that seem to cover most of his face.
Suddenly he turns towards someone not visible in the video. He questions the man whether he is a reporter, asks him where he is from and then abruptly slaps the person. Later he admits to the media that he did it.
This is a slap that happened almost eight years ago and, since he was a star and the victim an ordinary man, it was assumed that he had gotten away with it. After all, what can someone do if slapped by a movie star?
But the man who was slapped was made of sterner stuff. He filed a case in court, which got quashed at the lower level and he then moved all the way to the Supreme Court, which found merit in his complaint and rapped Govinda on the knuckles saying that he should settle this out of court by apologising.
Govinda’s reaction was marked by u-turns. First he shirked from apologising and told the media that it was a political conspiracy, otherwise how could the complainant follow up in court for so long. That might be true but there was still arrogance in that logic. It didn’t question the right or wrong of his action, merely the motive of the complainant in seeking redress.
But then wiser sense seems to have prevailed on Govinda after he was given two weeks by the court, which his lawyer said he would do. The actor has now apologized, even if not in person, and has also offered INR Rs500,000 as compensation for his action.
This marks a departure from his statements so far, where he first said that he slapped the man because he kicked the chair Govinda was sitting on and then later changed the version to saying that the man was harassing women on the movie set.
It took the fear of the court taking him to task that finally made him make amends. The moral of the lesson for him is that it is only easy to be a bully when you think there will be no retaliation.


One more split


Break-ups are happening at the speed of light in Bollywood these days. First there was the unexpected one of Ranbir Kapoor and Katrina Kaif. Then came news about Farhan Akhtar and his wife deciding to divorce. That was a relationship which had been on the rocks for some time and so wasn’t really a surprise.
But now comes news that Anushka Sharma has also broken up with cricketer Virat Kohli. They had been together since 2014 and their relationship had withstood some needless controversies when Anushka accompanied him on cricket tours and his poor form on the field was blamed unfairly on her. But the two had not let that affect them and no one really had thought that they were heading for a break up until recently when the speculations began to appear in the gossip pages.
It got confirmed when Virat himself put up a sad looking nerdy image on himself in his Instagram account with a caption that said ‘Heartbroken’. Slowly, the facts seem to be coming out in different news reports.
According to one, Virat had decided to not play in a cricket series so that he could spend time with Anushka but when he returned to India he found to his surprise that she had taken on a number of movie assignments and wouldn’t be available.
Another version said that Virat in fact proposed marriage to Anushka and she was not interested in it, leading to the end of the relationship.
While Anushka has been silent post the break up, Virat has not taken it so well. He has unfollowed her on Twitter and Instagram and at one party was apparently inviting people to dance saying that he was single now. It doesn’t seem like a temporary tiff and the chances of reconciliation are very slim.

Paying the price

An instance of the peculiar revenue model of Bollywood is on show in the performance of the Shah Rukh Khan starrer Dilwale, which has earned almost Rs150 crore in the Indian market, a decent number.
And yet there is news that Shah Rukh is going to reimburse 50 per cent of the losses that distributors of the movie suffered. It begs the question of how can anyone make a loss when the movie has made so much revenue.
The fact is that distributors buy the movie at a huge price from producers if they have stars like Shah Rukh Khan and it has to then be not just a hit but a huge blockbuster for them to make profits.  
In this case it certainly fell short of that, though Shah Rukh, whose company co-produced Dilwale, came away with a hefty profit because of how much the movie earned in other countries and by the selling of satellite and music rights.


Online theatre


Ram Gopal Varma was once known for making cutting edge movies using the new talent in an industry bereft of creativity. Lately all he is famous for is in trying to be famous.
A series of flop movies that went from bad to worse has left him with very little work in Bollywood and forcing him to return to the south Indian film industry where he is now making a biopic on the bandit Veerappan.
He however seems to have a tactic to remain relevant elsewhere too. Recently he announced on Twitter that he was going to start an online theatre to show short films made by him.
What he has in mind seems to be bordering on pornography, if his first such film’s poster of a scantily clad woman is anything to go by. The movie, which he dubs an erotic thriller, is titled Single X and Varma says that an online theatre is his way of getting around the problem of the Censor Board interfering with his work.

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