Shilpa Shetty & Richard Gere kissing controversy!

In February this year, when I was in India, Shilpa Shetty was constantly in the news. I was pretty surprised. I had been under the impression that she had already faded off into Bollywood history. Apparently not.

Soon after the racial controversy surrounding her participation in a UK reality TV show named Celebrity Big Brother, she seemed to have gained popularity and support from everybody on all sides of the world. All of a sudden, she was appearing everywhere - in the news, on Page 3 items, and at public functions, as well as being considered for a whole new set of roles in both Indian and Western movies! And then I read somewhere that she was in contention with none other than Aishwarya Rai for a movie named Unveiled, whose story revolved around a muslim women who has two husbands and a lover. It seemed like this was definitely the second coming of Shilpa Shetty. (BTW, Mallika Sherawat eventually landed that juicy role in Unveiled).

Things seemed to simmer down a little bit for Shilpa, but barely for a few weeks. Come April, as temperatures start to rise, she is hot in the news again. This time because of the Richard Gere kissing controversy! You can read the low-down on the controversy at that Wikipedia link. However, in this age of online videos, we don't want to just read about controversial events, we want to watch them. I have not been able to find a video of the "obscene kisses". If readers come across any such videos, please leave a comment and let us know. (Update on 3-May-2007: The video is available on YouTube; scroll down to the bottom of this post to watch it). Meanwhile, I did the next best thing I could - I looked for photos of the incident and gathered them together into a sequence which might give us a clue as to what might have happened. Before I say anything more, just take a look at the sequence of photos for yourself. Please excuse the low quality and uneven sizes of the photos. I had to cull them from diverse sources.






















Now, to the untrained Western eyes, these might look like the dashing white gentleman dipping and kissing the pretty oriental lady in the exotic saree. But even a child in India knows the truth... having grown up watching attempted rape scenes in numerous "wholesome, family" Indian movies, where the villain goes at the heroine as if kissing her is his one and only objective, like his very life depends on it, like kissing her is the raison d'etre for his very birth!

Don't the photos above seem to depict a man forcing himself on a woman? It is quite obvious that Shilpa Shetty was trying to keep up a sportive and brave appearance, despite her discomfort. She is even reported to have said that Richard Gere's stunt was a 'too much'. I don't understand why people have been protesting against her, burning her effigies, threatening to boycott her movies and serving a warrant on her. It is not always possible for a woman (or even a man) to defend herself when unexpectedly pounced upon. Another example of this is when Adrien Brody won the Best Actor Oscar award in 2003, and he celebrated by pouncing on his award presenter Halle Berry for a long kiss right there on the stage. There was not much Halle Berry could do to resist or escape that kiss.

I don't think that people should be harassed or arrested or punished for kissing in public. I don't think that kissing in public is obscene. But I also don't think that Richard Gere can pass off his actions as something 'fun' or 'no big deal'. What most probably happened is this: Richard Gere found himself on stage with this pretty actress looking all dolled up and exotic. She might have looked slightly retarded with that big-mouthed grin, but her tall, lithe sleeveless-blouse-and-saree-clad-body sure looked squeeze-worthy. And he seized the opportunity, using the excuse of demonstrating Aids-safe kisses on hands and cheeks, to get exactly that - a solid tight squeeze!

Richard must consider himself lucky that he is only being accused of obscenity. If Shilpa had not turned her face away and if he had ended up kissing her lips, he might have been facing charges of attempted rape in the land of Indian movies! Heh-heh!

Update on 4-May-2007: Of course, it wasn't gonna take too much time before the video would become available on YouTube. See below. Doesn't look so bad actually. And she does say soon after the kiss, "This was too much"!