What makes Jayne push her daughter into all this very adult world of the business of looking good? Jayne, in her twenties, was a model ad feels that she has started her career pretty late, in terms of the standards set by very young models, and she does not want her daughter not to have that advantage of starting early. She feels by getting her daughter Sasha to begin early, she is setting up the stage for Sasha to conquer the modeling world at the earliest.

As a parent I often can’t help wondering if by letting my child be herself, and not pushing her into becoming an adult so fast, am I going the right way or not.Although Sasha and her mom Jayne stay in UK, and we are in India, we too are often doing the same thing to our children. The countless reality shows showcasing children in hideous makeup and garish costumes, gyrating to mindless Hindi music, shows only parental wish-fulfillment and most probably nothing else. Some of the children are even younger than the age where they can comprehend the full extent of what they are doing. As Jayne, herself has said, that she is certainly not the only mother to prod her child into adulthood, the reality shows in our television channels quote the same sentiments. The world has changed since the time we were children, but sometimes girls like Sasha makes us wonder if parental expectations have changed at all or not over the generations. Are we not living with the same parental expectations that had dotted our very own childhoods? Can our children take this? One always is left wondering.

When Krane Chemical Corporation had to shut down its chemical plant in Bowmore, Mississippi, because of its toxic dump polluting the city’s drinking waters, people who had consumed the drinking water from the city services had to bear with the terrible effects of the carcinogenic contamination. And then the local court returned a verdict of punitive damages worth thirty eight million dollars for a lady who had lost her children and husband to cancer caused by the contaminated drinking water. Unperturbed, Krane Chemical decided to appeal to Mississippi Supreme Court, and proceeded to find a supreme court candidate who will rule in their behalf.

Grisham is one of the most popular writers of legal thrillers in the contemporary literary circle, and yet this is the second time he has decided to forgo the thrills for the sake of details that will enthral the reader perhaps more than the thrills. Earlier his experimentation with his first non-fiction writing, The Innocent Man, has also replaced legal thrills with shocking details of the travails of an innocent convict and the loopholes of the US judiciary. With The Appeal, Grisham touches again the similar territory, from a fictional standpoint. To think that it is possible to buy yourself a Supreme Court justice is a shocking thought, one that makes a mockery of any judicial system. And yet it must be happening at every corner of the world. In this day of consumerism, justice is no longer a beacon of hope. Often it’s a word that is found in dictionary, as the author has pointed out. We, the common people, have probably no place to go.

Our judiciary has seen many cases of innocent people getting framed and serving sentences, and hardened criminals being discharged dutifully from lack of evidences. And yet very rarely does one get to see so much of public sympathy for a person, who had mocked the entire system when he had connived with the underworld to obtain an assault rifle, AK56, some magazines and a pistol.

Sanjay Dutt’s counsel has claimed the incident as a ‘mistake’ stemming from a ‘need to protect one’s family’. Can acquiring, keeping and later destroying an assault rifle be called a ‘mistake’? Is everything fair when done in the name of a ‘need to protect one’s family’? And getting a six-year jail term for this is unfair? Should we let someone make a mockery of our system, even if we all love him? Yes, he does have a tremendous good will due to his screen image. From this can we really conclude that he bears no ill will towards people? A man who keeps an AK56 at home, isn’t as likely to use it if need comes? Why would someone risk keeping such a weapon at home, and later get it destroyed, if he had no plans of using it? An AK 56 is, after all, meant to kill.

Dutt had the best counsel money can buy. He had all the resources to fight a lengthy court battle. In a way he represents a glorious example of equality in the eyes of law. For many unfortunate others, justice delayed represents justice denied. In Dutts’s case, it was a fair battle. Only the result of the battle was not in his favour.

From a purely personal viewpoint, I think Dutt should consider him to be lucky. Keeping an assault weapon can get you a sentence of a minimum of five years. Being a son of an upright political leader like Sunil Dutt, he should have known better. He was 34 years old when he procured the rifle. One cannot even dismiss that as youthful exuberance. Once Sanjay Dutt is back, he’ll be in the same social rung, and financially or socially, life will be just the same, as it was before his sojourn in jail. It is far more difficult to be a common man, and go through all such things, and try to get a life back, almost impossible in fact. But celebrities do have it easy.