A cad kisses a pretty woman
At the earliest opportunity they were out on the streets burning effigies, pictures and chanting all sorts of abuse.
That in itself contributes to the greenhouse gases but this also seems to be a common type of displaying displeasure in civil demonstrations in the Asian sub-continent.
And would have brought this about? Shilpa Shetty of the UK Celebrity Big Brother 2007 fame and shame was hosting an AIDS awareness event in India and she pulled Richard Gere on stage.
It transpired that after a brief talk Richard Gere took her hand, kissed it, then pulled her towards him, hugged her and then kissed her and kissed her again repeatedly as he leaned well over her.
The audiences applauded until some right-wing Hindu organisation, politicians and lawyers decided this was seemingly outraging public decency and now; Shilpa and Richard have to answer to a judge with the possibility of serving time.
Mr. Gere was no Officer and a Gentleman in his actions, he was playing out Pretty Woman to the extreme such that one felt a bit squeamish after viewing the first kiss.
The backlash is however interesting considering this is the country that gave us Kama Sutra; one would be forgiven for thinking the way India got to be the second most populous country in the world was by thinking of the birds and the bees.
Such rank hypocrisy belittles a people with a long, varied and interesting history; backward, illiterate, regressive and ignorant are words that come to mind; but they can never be used to describe India in this context, however, I might be wrong.
Strong words my brother. I'm not in favour of the reaction to it, at the
most, the Indians should have just realised it was a culture clash, and let
it go. They've taken it too far, and it's not really fair.
A very irrational response, I daresay. No one there is prepared to look at
things the way Silpa felt about the whole kissing incident. All they're
interested in is the way they feel about it...
Web logs by Akin Akintayo is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Netherlands License.