Out of India, GAUTAMAN BHASKARAN considers the current Indian and Bollywood Cinema.

THE HOTTEST news in Bollywood at the moment is the Shilpa Shetty-Richard Gere smooch that has taken the sheen off the Aishwarya Rai-Abhishek Bachchan wedding on April 20. And, the best part is, a playful gesture has been blown out of proportion by India’s self-styled moral-keepers.

When Hollywood actor Gere kissed Bollywood star Shetty on her cheeks during a recent AIDS awareness campaign in New Delhi it seemed like the most harmless of exchanges. But India’s fundamental Hindu political organisations were so irked by what they called public display of private passion that they went on the rampage, burning effigies of Richard and Shilpa, and storming the film set of Anurag Basu’s Metro in Mumbai, where the actress was working.

Gere, a renowned Indophile and devotee of the Dalai Lama, was hosting the event for the Heroes Project, a charitable organisation he founded in 2004 to tackle AIDS, which now affects five million Indians.

An entertainer to the core, Richard was merely trying to communicate to the audience of largely semi-illiterate truck drivers by re-enacting a scene from his hit 2004 ballroom dancing drama, Shall We Dance, first made in Japanese with a different group of actors. To amuse the crowd, Gere, who does not speak Hindi, thought up of an impromptu Bollywood style sing-and-smooch skit on the stage he was sharing with Shetty.

Richard, who came into the Indian cinema audiences’ radar in 1982 with An Officer and a Gentleman, followed by his still more appealing Pretty Woman, has been slapped with a legal case and told to leave the country by organisations, such as the Shiv Sena and Vishwa Hindu Parishad, who have in recent years taken upon themselves the role of a moral-brigade.

Strangely, it is only when fantasy spills out of the screen that India’s saffron-robed holier-than-though crowd emerges on a punishing-vendetta spree. Kissing may still be rare in Indian cinema, but it is not new. Smoochers go right back to the 1930s, while recent releases like Khwaish went to town with an ad slogan that talked about the movie’s 17 lip-locks. But the pious rebels looked the other way here, and so do they when scantily clad women thrust their pelvis in vulgar motions or dialogues drip with double-meanings, often sexist and demeaning to women.