Talk of lousy timing. On the day that the Dutt cronies were all geared to shoo away cameras and give “No comments” bytes, the TV crews were all trained elsewhere, gathering fodder on the IPL spot fixing scandal. S. Sreesanth and co. hijacked the prime time of every prominent news channel and even the Net had the bowlers’ latest googly flashed everywhere with Sanjay Dutt’s ride to the Tada court reduced to a junior artiste’s role in a film. Actually it serves them all right. Dutt’s surrender (already put off by a month) was being orchestrated like a hero’s send-off to the front, most unbefitting a convict’s trek to jail. Whenever Sanju emerges from jail (sooner than later, one guesses), wonder what will be in store. A hero’s welcome, one supposes, if there’s no other breaking news on that day.

Unlike the rest of his party, BJP politician Shatrughan Sinha has been batting for Dutt; Sinha also claimed some of the credit for getting him out on bail over 15 years ago. While on the home front, Shatru dithers by sometimes naming Sushma Swaraj for the top job in the country if his party were to come to power, then switching to Narendra Modi mode when best buddy Yashwant Sinha roots for him, and backtracking a few weeks later to say that L.K. Advani would be the ideal choice, he seems to have read the climate across the border with a lot more political acumen.

A regular visitor to Pakistan, Shatru was invited to Zia-ul-Haq’s grandson’s nikaah a few months ago. Once there, he set up meetings with all hues of politicians where he had the opportunity to gauge each one’s popularity at close quarters. After having brunch with Nawaz Sharif, Shatru had come back and told me with a lot of confidence, “I feel there is a wave in Nawaz Sharif’s favour. There are good chances of him coming back as Prime Minister of Pakistan.” He had said this much before the election fever had reached its pitch. Sharif’s family had younger members who turned out to be Sonakshi’s admirers. “I was told that they admired the fact that she was such a big success with all her traditions intact, without compromising with her principles,” he had preened. With Nawaz Sharif now firmly in the saddle, the Sinhas will be hobnobbing with the mighty and the powerful of Pakistan in a big way.

This weekend belongs to another young new name: Arjun Kapoor, the only son of Boney and the late Mona Kapoor. Extremely lucky to have got a big break from Yash Raj Films (last year’s Ishaqzaade), he was even luckier to have got a double role in his second film itself (Aurangzeb, released this Friday). However, easy stardom seems to have already affected him. A TV crew that went to do one of those pre-release interviews with him was surprised to see how much he had changed between his first film and his second. The young girl interviewing him got the brunt of it because the air-conditioning wasn’t working well and Arjun was irritable because of that.

What a lot of people don’t know is that it is not stardom that’s affecting Arjun. He was always a bit uppity. When he was barely five years old, we had gathered a whole lot of celebrity kids for a children’s day feature. A cake, some goodies, gifts and games had been arranged at a Juhu hotel by the publication I then worked for. All the celebs happily sent their kids across and all of them had a whale of a time. Except Arjun Kapoor. A junior reporter who was overseeing the photo feature called up to complain that Arjun was the only kid who was aloof. He kept picking up the phone in the hotel room (no mobiles in those days) and firing his driver, asking him to come there and be ready to pick him up immediately. All this when he was just five years old!

Arjun has always been a kid who kept to himself. He does have a lot of friends, mainly other celebrity kids like Dia Mirza’s fiancé Sahil, and B.R. Chopra’s grandsons Kapil and Abhay. He lets his hair down only with them and is otherwise aloof. Not quite the friendly, effusive sort of guy that say, Ranveer Singh is.

So the arrogance has little to do with stardom. He was born with a little attitude.

Bharathi S. Pradhan is editor, The Film Street Journal