Interest in the attack on Tiger Shroff has spread far and wide, but did you think it would reach Kenya?
Well, it did. The Star, an English newspaper from Nairobi, shared news of the Bollywood actor’s close shave with death when two gunmen shot at him on Sunday.
Closer to home, Pakistan’s daily The Dawn and the Daily Star in Bangladesh carried the news.
This is a reminder, if a reminder is needed, that Indian cinema and its film stars are international celebrities. We knew Shah Rukh, Salman Khan, and Amitabh Bachchan were famous beyond our shores and clearly Tiger Shroff, with his macho muscularity, had also made the cut.
‘Bishnoi Bullets Bollywood’
The attempt on Tiger Shroff’s life has been page one news in India for the last three days. On Monday and much of Tuesday, it was the only story on television news channels.
Newspapers such as The Hindustan Times have devoted a full page to it while The Indian Express wrote a lead editorial— ‘Shooting in Juhu is a warning to Mumbai’.
The Times of India also weighed in on the issue with its Wednesday editorial, ‘Lawrence of Sabarmati’. It made the solemn and depressing point that mobsters and movies have been “intertwined” ever since films were made.
This keen interest is a measure of the actor’s standing in Bollywood. But its news value went beyond Shroff: The reported involvement of the Lawrence Bishnoi gang in the assassination attempt gave it far-reaching consequences.
The question is, “whether the state is able to prevent organized crime from regaining a foothold in the city,” wrote The Indian Express in its editorial.
Which means it is very serious business but filmi, nevertheless. So, TV news channel CNN-News 18 called it ‘Bishnoi Bullets Bollywood’.
‘Tiger Zinda Hai’, the channel added, using the title of a 2017 film starring Salman Khan. That is piquant since Wednesday morning’s newspapers like The Times of India reported that `Salman Khan was the gang’s real target’ of the attack.
Times Now called the shooting, ‘Bishnoi v/s Bollywood—a Bollywood type thriller ’.
NDTV portrayed Tiger Shroff as one of the heroes he plays on the screen: “(He displayed) courage under fire,” said one of its anchors. Right after the shooting, the assailants ran away. Shroff jumped into the driver’s seat. He immediately took his injured driver to the hospital, said the channel’s anchor.
The Times of India provided a human angle to this story with a profile of the driver, Firdaus Ibrahim Baloch in ‘With Shroffs for 28 years, Baloch is more than just Tiger’s driver’.
Tiger Shroff added his own superstar touch by meeting Maharashtra’s deputy Chief Minister Eknath Shinde with a bandage on his chest and his arm. No singlet, no T-shirt, just the ripple of his six-pack. That photograph flashed across screens, social media and the news media: Tiger was not only alive but he was all sinews and strength.
As the plot to reportedly kill Shroff deepened, so did the telling of it in the news media. Wednesday’s editions of Hindustan Times and The Indian Express brought the moll, or the gangster’s female accomplices, into the story. Both reported the arrest of four more accused in Delhi, for allegedly supplying weapons used to shoot at Shroff’s car.
According to a senior police officer, The Indian Express told us the story: One Kunal, recently out of jail on bail, was recruited by Bishnoi’s `go-to handler’ (Anil Pandit).
He met Radha “and developed a relationship with her”. He persuaded her to carry the weapon to Mumbai by train. ‘A minor boy’ collected the gun from her at a hotel. That gun was used on Tiger Shroff’s vehicle.
You can’t get more Bollywood than this.
Also read: When the Rahul and Priyanka Show took over Indian TV news
What is fact, what is fiction?
The newspapers did well to give us the sequence of events, to profile the assailants and place the attack on Shroff in the context of earlier attacks in Mumbai.
Hindustan Times’ ‘Attacks on B’wood rise: Bishnoi Bros stay out of Mum cops reach’ may not be the felicitous headline but the story about six previous cases of targeted attacks provides a grim reminder of the underworld’s underhanded ways in Mumbai.
The Indian Express report, `Phones off for hours, then a call to cabbie: How attacks were nabbed the day after’ reads like a clickbait headline but it tells how us one phone call and CCTV footage at railway stations led to the arrests of three prime accused.
But when fact and fiction get muddled in the details, it’s confusing for the reader/viewer.
Most news outlets reported that five shots were fired by one assailant. India TV, however, said, ‘7 seconds 7 firings’.
Several TV news channels said that Tiger Shroff was returning from a football game. The Hindu on 18 October wrote that he had been at work. The Times of India reported that the actor was “leaving after attending a birthday party.”
So which was it?
The Indian Express told us that one attacker, Rehan, had been paid Rs 37,000 for the attack. However, almost all the other news outlets went with Rs 35,000 and the Hindi Dainik Jagran claimed it was Rs 34,000.
Navbharat Times reported that the accused had spent 20 days on a recce. But its sister concern, Times Navbharat, told us they conducted a two-day recce. And Dainik Bhaskar reported they had spent a month together in Mumbai—with all costs paid for by the “masterminds”.
By the way, none of the news media is quite sure who these masterminds are since Lawrence Bishnoi and his brother are both in jail.
One last example of the confusing information.
Aaj Tak’s anchor said that the three main suspects of the shooting were identified and “nabbed” inside a train compartment – The Indian Express told the same story.
However, when Aaj Tak used generative AI’s powers to recreate the scene in a video track, we saw the three men being detained on the platform.
Is this an AI hallucination or does AI know something no one else does?
The author tweets @shailajabajpai. Views are personal.
(Edited by Ratan Priya)