Bhai is so nice! Behold the charitable genius of Salman Khan

At one point during the arguments in the hit-and-run case at the Sessions Court in Mumbai, Salman Khan started shaking his head vigorously. He was looking at his lawyer, the defense counsel Shrikant Shivde, who was telling the court how his client suffers from a mental ailment and his condition will only get worse in jail. It took a minute or two before the lawyer noticed Salman’s gestures and then as a result, he did not submit the certificate from the doctor to the bench. Perhaps, Salman didn’t want to be seen as a ‘mental’ patient. But the very same ‘good human being’ sat silently as his lawyers decided to tom-tom – against every principle of philanthropy – the various charities that Salman Khan is involved in. Shivde said that charity was in the actor’s blood and that over the years, he had spent over Rs 47 crore in charity. [caption id=“attachment_2238036” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Salman Khan. Courtesy: Solaris Images[/caption] “He is a founder of a trust called Being Human. He also supports three schools and has helped facilitate the heart surgery of over 600 children. This community service will be affected,” Shivde said. Of course, Shivde didn’t mention that a lot of these charitable activites also became well-publicised only after 2002 – the year in which the hit-and-run accident occurred. It might be argued that any sort of charity is good but at what point does charity go from helping the needy to becoming a PR vehicle? In a sense, Salman’s lawyer’s argument approach was similar to that of former Goldman Sachs director Rajat Gupta, who was sentenced to two years in jail for insider trading. He was such a big name, in fact, that he managed to get people like Bill Gates and Kofi Annan to write letters pleading for leniency in his case, largely because of a lifetime of charitable works. Judge Jed S. Rakoff of the Federal District Court in Manhattan did seem to be swayed by these arguments as the recommended sentencing was anywhere between eight to ten years. But he still felt the need to punish Gupta. “When one looks at the nature and circumstances of the offense, the picture darkens considerably,” Rakoff wrote, adding that “his criminal acts represented the very antithesis of the values he had previously embodied.” The key point in the argument – ‘his criminal acts represented the very antithesis of the values he had previously embodied’ – is true for Salman as well. There is one difference: For better or worse, Rajat Gupta’s philanthropic activities predated his legal troubles. Salman’s most prominent charities were established after he became embroiled in the hit-and-run case. The arguments made for Salman by his friends and associates on TV shows and social media were very similar – ‘he is a good human being,’ ‘he is a simple person,’ ‘he has a kind heart.’ While all that may be true, it doesn’t take away from the fact that the court found him guilty of killing another human being. To turn to charity – as most Indians do – in the hope that doing some ‘good’ will help them in the after-life or wash away the sins of a lifetime is not surprising. Of course, he could have chosen to do more: be like P Kalyanasundaram – a 73-year-old librarian who has been donating every rupee he earned to the poor for the last 30 years. As a result of his philanthropy, Kalyanasundaram received various awards and he promptly donated his total prize money – Rs. 30 crore – to those in need. Or Salman could even have been more like his fellow superstar Shah Rukh Khan, who does a lot of charity but very rarely do we hear anything being said about. “I don’t like talking about it [charity]. A lot of people and my friends always tell me I should do photographs and stuff when I meet some people,” Shah Rukh once said. “But I don’t believe in it. It is a true thing that if I believe in a cause, I should do it silently and not use my persona as an actor to advocate that.” But instead, Salman and his lawyers chose to thrust it in our faces in a despicable, desperate act that reminded us of all the reasons to not like him. According to the 2014 Forbes Rich List, ‘Sallu Bhai’ was the richest Indian celebrity with earnings of Rs 244.50 crore – surely Rs 47 crore over a period of time amounts to little more than peanuts to him and given his bank balance, it would be easy enough to keep the charities going even while he was in prison. The PR that these charities generate, however,  has been worth its weight in gold for Salman and his team of lawyers. His philanthropy has instead been deployed as a sophisticated makeover machine that sought to change his arrogant, brash image to a much more humane version and to that end, it has succeeded. But as Jack London once wrote, “A bone to the dog is not charity. Charity is the bone shared with the dog, when you are just as hungry as the dog.” One day, we hope Salman gets that too.