Richard Gere & Shilpa Shetty - Kissa Cheeky Kiss Ka

It was a clumsy take, Richard Gere holding Shilpa Shetty in embrace and planting kisses on her cheek. The Great Ganesha, in a piece elsewhere on this site, has thoughtfully given us a video link to 'the ignoble deed'. A 24x7 news channel repeated the video-clip again and again, as a very vocal Shilpa held forth at a damage-control press conference.

She took on the media for making mountain of a molehill - 'baath ko bathangar banaathe ho'. Don't make yourself (media) look so silly, she said, blaming the media for fueling protests by the uninformed, and activists out to milk mileage out of it. "Don't over-react," said Shilpa, who, after the 'Big Brother' episode in Britain, appears to have grown tall enough to be in a position to advice and talk at the media. Whether or not the assembled reporters listened to the lady, they couldn't break her down with their rapid-fire questioning. A lesser actor would have been driven to tears.

A lot was happening, as she spoke, elsewhere in the country. There was a rash of protests, effigy-burning, and condemnatory statements over the incident that happened at a Sunday gathering in New Delhi, convened to highlight HIV/AIDS epidemic among India's truck drivers.

Richard Gere, Buddhist, Dalai Lama disciple, AIDS campaigner, and Hollywood actor, presumably, thought he could weigh in with a spot of entertainment for the crowd, with an impromptu kiss and dance routine with Shilpa Shetty, our own celebrity AIDS campaigner. He probably thought we desis are fed on too many item numbers in Bollywood films for entertainment. This was what Shilpa sought to convey in her televised media chat.

I don't know the circumstances that prompted Shilpa to come upfront, to explain what, to most viewers, was an inexplicable behaviour by Richard Gere. Far from playing a helpless victim, Shilpa Shetty defended the man; went on the offensive at desi media, for being so inconsiderate to someone who wants to do some good for the country.

Why wasn't the media writing about the cause he came here to promote? "I feel sad", she said, referring to the outburst of public protest, fueled by media reports, and a video-clip played out on TV channels repeatedly, "I don't want a foreigner to take back bad memories from here." Some more quotes follow.

Shilpa-to-media: React (to what happened), but don't over-react.

I don't feel anything wrong was done; did he kiss my lips? ...it was all done in good humor.

I don't think Richard did something very wrong...He belongs to a different culture. Why do you (media) expect him (to conform to ours)?

Who are these people (protesting); what have they done for the country? ...Let them do something for a cause before pointing a finger at us.

I understand he (Richard) went slightly overboard....but it certainly wasn't his intention.

He phoned me three times...I felt strange when he apologized, so profusely that I felt embarrassed.

Shilpa Shetty may have felt she was batting straight; but she didn't quite come out this way on TV. Point was she batted for Richard, much of the time; and kept repeating herself, playing into ploy of the media that keeps asking same things in varied ways, in different voices, probing, hoping,and waiting for her to lose her cool, preferably, burst into tears. That would have been a great video-clip. I am not being cynical; only realistic. Any media manager would have told Shilpa when to switch herself off. It wasn't such a good idea for her to have gone on, and on, the way she did.

Shilpa's outburst at the media is understandable. What she perhaps doesn't understand is that media, much of it anyway, isn't there to put things in a positive light, but to report them as they perceive it. Media has celebrity bias. Had Richard Gere done it with a plain Jane, HIV positive, picked out from a AIDS awareness campaign meeting, the photo would still have made the papers, but on an inside page. Media knows how not to over-react, Shilpa.

When Richard Gere, who must have kissed a lot of them in his line of duty, could go 'slightly overboard' with Shilpa, who are these humble TV camera persons, not to go ga-ga ? Our TV guys are trained to keep their tape running when they see a celebrity indiscretion. Shilpa Shetty's advice to our media not to over-react is okay for an ideal world wherein newspapers are accountable to readers, rather than their sponsors and share-holders. We know that you know, Shilpa, we don't live in an ideal world; and TV and print media are flogged as infotainment product, with mainstream press getting increasingly tabloid to promote sales; with TV news and other programmes formatted for the benefit of commercial breaks.

As a sub-text to the Richard-Shilpa episode we had Taslima Nassreen weighing in with a statement. She reportedly told media in Bhopal that when Shilpa was 'at ease with the incident nobody had the right to challenge her freedom'. Taslima dubbed the protestors as fundamentalists. She may be right, they may well be so, but do we want to hear this from a foreigner? One would have thought the celebrity Bangladeshi in exile would do well for herself to keep a low profile till she gains Indian citizenship.