Richard Gere's famous wet smacks on Shilpa Shetty's luscious cheeks may have offended a few repressed Indians including a small town judge but the damage has been far reaching. The world has judged us to be prudes who are no different from the mullahs of the East, quick to save the honor of our culture, our sensibilities, blah blah blah and yet all this is nothing more than a pathetic attention whoring charade, a fact any sane Indian would tell you.

The moral police do their best to grab media attention but the underground flesh trade continues smoothly. A few raids are done here and there, a few love cards are burnt nearing Valentine's Day but romance and sex continues to thrive in the country.

Indian magazines are showing more female flesh, more adult content is being written about and discussed but it's the fear of violence from the moral police that silences the middle class and lets the hooligans get away with their easily offended sensibilities.

The best way of pushing back is by being more affectionate in public; no I'm not talking about groping and mauling that eve teasers seem to get away with but holding hands, giving a peck on the cheek or a hug. And at the same time having more adult content available for adult entertainment with useful tips about all the stuff we adults like to do.

Which is why the internet is a medium beyond the reach of the conservative sensibilities and comes as a breath of fresh air as far as expressing Indian sexuality goes. On debonairblog.com the base Indian desires have been aired quite frequently and salacious news are reported from across the country.

The most famous one is about the Andhra dance/'mujra' girls. Forget about your bar girls from Mumbai, these girls strip down to nothing and wriggle around in their birthday suits with the men ogling at them.

There is quite a lot of other stuff available too, like stories from the human digest, videos of couples having sex, bedroom tips etc. Desipapa is an age-old, in Internet terms, chronicle of desi smut, and good for them! All the smelly, fluid exchanging heaving, panting and nasty stuff laid out bare for public consumption which clearly mocks the conservative 'save Indian culture' SOBs.

I was ignoring this story until I saw several Indians in the blogging community use this opportunity to take cheap shots at Indian culture. In the context of Rajiv Malhotra's latest essay on Whiteness and how it impacts Indians, it occurred to me whether this breed of Indian bloggers were displaying the classic symptoms of whiteness - adopting the white gaze to interpret everything Indian in a bid to become whiter than white. After all, Fair and Lovely is only skin deep.

In terms of the kissing sequence of actions, Gere starts by grabbing and kissing the back of her hand. Even this lingers for a while and clearly interrupts Shilpa's speech at the mike. Gere follows this manouevre by grabbing her upper arms and kissing both cheeks. At this point, Shilpa appears to me a bit taken aback; I thought she rolls her eyes a bit, steels herself but allows him to continue, hoping perhaps it will be over soon.

Little did she know that Gere was determined to do a practical demo of safe sex knowing his responsibility as an AIDS awareness campaigner. How better to demonstrate the risks of contracting HIV than to allow someone to deposit significant quantities of strange saliva on your neck and cheek? that too at an AIDS awareness event? Perhaps realizing that he had not yet made enough of a deposit, Gere essentially gets Shilpa in a bearhug and plants several more kisses in any exposed area his puckered lips could reach. Shilpa tries to escape without making a big deal out of it. At one point she is even bent 90 degrees at the waist but to no avail.

The video catches a couple of guests, one of whom was probably Emraan Hashmi, the noted serial kisser of Bollywood - who appear to be watching indulgently initially but that soon starts to fade into sick smiles. The mad moment finally passes.

Its between Gere and Shilpa. If she felt she was groped then she is perfectly entitled to take Gere to court. Wish some stranger would have been my knight in shining armour when I groped in a bus and the men just averted their eyes - thats Indian Culture for you.

We women can and have been fighting our own battles for a long time and will continue to do so well into the future, we don't need hypocrites riding on our coat tails when it serves their purpose.

Also, I agree completely to your reasoning that while on the surface level, some peck-in-the-cheek or lip-locking drives that moral police crazy, on grounds that our culture needs to be protected and not let down to be eroded in the hands of the Western Culture.

But just go a little deep, students near schools and colleges have easy access to undesirable content and what has the moral police done for that. Get into any internet center [not the ones from Sify/Reliance etc as these centers have filters installed in the machines], and a quick look on the history of websites visited shows that a vast majority of them are 'sex' related websites. Has the moral police and culture saviours worked out a feasible solution to this.

Work on cleaning the interior part and the volume that is getting affected by this adult content in print/press/digital is more instead of wasting time on a Gere-Shetty case. Half of the Indian population doesn't even know who Gere is and the media hoopla is only adding more to this sensationalism.

Doesn't the media have nothing else to cover? I guess so!! Why can't these two do whatever in their bedrooms. Doing it in public attracts morons like us to watch, read and write. Suckers we are.....all of us....

tanay... I am not sure I get your point. sure, if India decides that porn and other items are undesirable in this culture, fine. but I have news for you, college students are going to be getting busy anyway, even if they cannot buy girlie mags near campus. And part of the issue here is that the more you suppress access to certain items, the more desperate people are to get their hands on them.

Sanjay... apparently you have no idea what sexual assault really is. I agree, what gere did was, well, culturally undesirable. and icky. But shetty herself said she was not offended, so leave it at that!

This is cache, read story here