Well said, Shilpa. Am so glad she didn't apologise and I think what she said was sensible too. Simply because I think this is ridiculous, to say the very least. I am, of course, talking about the big fuss about Richard Gere kissing Shilpa – and that too, only on her cheek. What is wrong with that? For starters, Shilpa herself didn’t mind. Why should any one else then? She seemed pretty happy with it, going by the pics. But was the kiss un-Indian? Oh yes, it surely is. We worship women as ‘mata’ in India, remember. But it’s perfectly ok to drool over the same women on screen – take even Shilpa for instance. She’s been prancing around in some pretty skimpy costumes for a while now, just like most of our heroines. Or to nudge or pinch or finger the same ‘matas’ in crowded buses and trains. Or to go onto porn sites via the Internet. Or to take sick pics on cellphone cameras..or to…..the list goes on and on. But all that is ok, because it’s all done by us desis. The minute a phirangi Gere comes along and goes something like this, so that’s totally wrong, isn’t it? Our cultural police swing into action because he is insulting Indian culture. Talk about double standards. And I didn’t really notice Shilpa protesting much. The way our movies (and our culture) is going is so Western. Our clothes are western, our speech is western and even our film actors look and talk Western. Heroines no longer have a pan-Indian look – they go for the pan-European look (a la Italian, Spanish etc). They even try and talk English with a Yank accent. Heck, they even kiss like the Western movies nowadays… But something small like this happens and we act as though we’re all dressed in saris and dhothis and talking only Hindi (or whatever) and as though Partition and Globalisation haven’t happened. As though it is now 1907. Talk about dumb and dumber…
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And then there's the Abhiash wedding...God, what an overkill!! The media’s becoming worse that the UK tabloid press. Reckon we’re making up for all the lost time with a vengeance.