Rhinocrisy

I’m just registering a note of shame over this story about Richard Gere, which you may have missed. Apparently the guy kissed Shilpa Shetty (a Bollywood starlet) a couple of times on the cheeks during an AIDS rally in Mumbai. Subsequently a band of Hindu nationalist thugs known as the Shiv Sena (which has a long and illustrious history of idiocy) staged protests around the country, burning and beating Gere in effigy and burning pictures of Shilpa Shetty, in protest of this outrageous act of indecency:

“Even if the protest has been staged by the Shiv Sainiks, I would not blame them as the way Shilpa Shetty and Richard Gere indulged in a shameless public display, it was not at all in keeping with our culture and tradition,” Sena MP Sanjay Raut said.

Now, I know I’m an ultra-liberal American; I was raised here and my permissive attitudes are informed by American libertarian ethics. But I’m pretty sure people kiss all the time in India. Given the current rate of growth of the population, I’m also pretty sure they get up to other things as well. And they certainly display affection in public settings quite often. Here’s a picture of Rani Mukherjee kissing Shah Rukh Khan:

And let’s not count the number of lips-on-bare-chest scenes I’ve seen in Bollywood films, which might be considered a bit more risqué than a simple kiss on the cheek. So let’s be clear that this is NOT the viewpoint of Indian society. Indians are certainly more conservative than Americans are, but this is the extreme reaction of a bunch of right-wing nutjobs, not a mainstream view.

There might be some value in debating whether this anger flows from the “interracial” nature of the kiss in question, but mostly I think the only value to be gained here is to wave an angry hand in the direction of the cloud of hornets infesting that particular corner of the Indian polity. Please, please, you Nazi shitheads, for the sake of all of us, disappear off the face of the planet.