A Kiss is Just

[sparkle hayter]

So a warrant is out on Richard Gere (and Shilpa Shetty) for Gere's hug and cheek kiss of Shetty in a faux Bollywood dance at an AIDS awareness event in India.

This happens relatively often in India, an offended individual files a case of obscenity against a prominent person for a kiss, usually in a Bollywood film. The case makes the media, and inspires lots of chatter on the internet, around the water cooler and in the teahouses, and then the case is thrown out of court by India's somber judiciary.

Hrithik Roshan and Aishwarya Rai were both charged with obscenity for this kiss in Dhoom 2 (He's a master criminal, she's a petty thief the police have recruited to catch him, and this is a twisted trust exercise he initiates):



(As I said before, this isn't your grandfather's Bollywood.)

It's a small but very vocal minority of right wing Hindus for the most part who file these nuisance cases. And they are selective -- AFAIK, no one filed charges against Mallika Sherawat for her ;19 onscreen kisses in one film, breaking her previous Bollywood record of 17 kisses.