Thursday, April 26, 2007

The Kiss

Gere faces Indian arrest warrant
Richard Gere and Shilpa Shetty
Photographs of the embrace made the front pages in India
An Indian court has issued an arrest warrant for Hollywood actor Richard Gere after he kissed Bollywood star Shilpa Shetty in public.

Gere, 57, kissed Shetty, 31, several times on the cheek at an Aids awareness event in New Delhi earlier this month.

Local resident Poonam Chand Bhandari filed a complaint and Judge Dinesh Gupta called it "an obscene act".

It was not immediately clear how the warrant could affect Gere, who is a frequent visitor to India.

Shetty, who found fame outside India as the winner of Celebrity Big Brother in the UK, has also been asked to appear before the court.

Photographs of the clinch were splashed across front pages of newspapers in India.

Public displays of affection are still largely taboo in India, and protestors in Mumbai (Bombay) set fire to effigies of Gere following the incident.

Dance scene

Shetty has defended Gere saying that it was all done "in good humour".

"He especially told me to tell the media that he didn't want to hurt any Indian sensibilities," she said.

She said Gere had only been re-enacting a scene from his film Shall We Dance.

Under Indian law, a person convicted of public obscenity faces up to three months in prison, a fine or both.

Gere, star of films such as Chicago and Pretty Woman, is a Buddhist and travels to India frequently to visit the Dalai Lama, who lives in exile in the north of the country.

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