It wasn’t a kiss, says The Times of India

What Richard Gere did to Shilpa Shetty on stage in New Delhi the other day wasn’t a kiss. It was a peck, says The Times of India, making a finer point. And here we were, the uninformed, getting hot and bothered, protesting, burning effigies and shouting hai, hai slogans without as much as knowing a peck from a kiss. Now we have it from TOI, quite unambiguously, and I quote, “About the latest case of Shilpa Shetty and Richard Gere, it must be clarified that it wasn’t a kiss, which is meant to be planted on the partner’s lips”.

“It was a peck,” adds TOI, “which in many countries is a normal way to greet each other, and not a sexual act”. It wasn't an S-act, agreed,; but it wasn’t a normal greeting either. Shilpa herself admits it – ‘Richard went slightly overboard’. People elsewhere in the world who peck each other by way of normal greeting are not usually seen bending over their partner in close embrace, while working on her cheeks, both sides, more than once.

The Times(Mysore edition)story – Curb national pecking disorder - carries a picture showing Richard, bending over Shilpa, in a ‘pecking’ position. Says the photo caption,‘The kiss that has nation up in arms’. Nit-picking apart, the newspaper story, played up on Page One, has it, “in a situation where the law is vague and the general public apathetic, the moral brigade seems to be usurping the space’. Shouldn’t that be read as ‘morality brigade’?

Anyway, the thing about TOI is that it gets down to the basics, just in case its readers are clueless even four days after the event, which has been played out in newspapers, TV channels and by bloggers (including this one). I can’t think of many other newspapers that would have given thought to the possibility that the millions who read the Gere-Shetty story and viewed visuals on TV and the Internet, wouldn’t have applied their mind to draw a line between a peck and a kiss.

Where TOI lays it on the line is in this sentence – ‘even the slightest of pecks can raise a furore in the land of the Kamasutra and Khajuraho. Correction, my reporter friend, we’re now known as the land of call centres and the Bollywood that gave the world the song number – Choli ke peeche kya hai. And I have a problem with the TOI report that says bizarre public reaction (to ’a slight peck or a mere brush of the lips’) is not something peculiar to India – ‘it seems to be a sub-continental malady’.

Such needless comparison, that in no way furthers the story, may not go down well with our neighbours. I doubt if the story would have played out in this manner, had a comparable incident happened in Pakistan or Bangladesh. I don’t know if TV channels there would have shown the tell-tale video clip, which fueled widespread public protest. One can’t imagine such incident happening there, in the first place. And in some parts of the world, the pair involved would not have got away with it, and survived to tell their tale to the media.

Cross-posted in Desicitics .

Goody girl is coming

The first thing I envisioned, on reading that Jade Goody (you know her, don't you?) has been granted tourist visa to India, was a protest demo, placard waving, and slogan shouting – ‘Goody, go back’. When I shared the thought with a friend, he quipped: “Get real, yaar; she’s no Simon Commission”.

Anyway, the Goody girl’s India visit is not going to go unnoticed by our media and TV. Sight-seeing-wise Jane would, presumably, take in the TaJ Mahal,Jaipur, and Delhi (would someone take her to Rajghat and tell her about a guy called Gandhi and his S Africa days?). Maybe she would do Mumbai, to get a feel of where and how Shetty (Shilpa) lives; and drop in at a Bollywood studio. Wouldn’t be surprised if some producer offers her a film role.

The point is: Jade Goody is in for interesting times. I have a question, though. Was it her own bright idea to visit India? Going by a London sourced report, India tourism office there had invited her “to experience India’s healing nature”. There were ads. to this effect placed in British papers. But then, the report quoting ministry sources in New Delhi had that the ads., placed to take advantage of the media coverage around the Big Brother row, were meant to be ‘satirical’. Goody however was welcome, paying her own passage. Jade wouldn’t be treated as India’s official guest. Nor would a red-carpet be laid out by anyone.

Jade Vs Shilpa: The baddie gets the boot

The latest in British reality TV is that Jade Goody(Baddie) gets the boot; and Shipla Shetty stays in the Celebrity Big Brother house. If India’s Shipa (Beti) is declared a winner, it may well be interpreted as the triumph of British fairness and tolerance over racist pit bulls.

Acres of media space have been devoted to the Jade-Shilpa ‘reality’ spat. But the spate of words and sound byte expended on, what Brendan O’Neill calls, the bizarre invasion of real life by the British reality TV, doesn’t quite explain why the fuss. If it is about race, what is new? Aren’t we familiar with the status of prejudice in Britain? Do we need reality TV to put us wise on it? Many commentators in Britain, however, would have us believe that it is not about racism;it's about class – pedigree Vs pit bull, as Carole Midgley says in The Times.

Brendan O’Neill puts the ‘international handwringing over Jade v Shilpa’ in perspective, in a Spiked commentary. Excerpts:

Everyone wants a piece of the overblown Shilpa v Jade controversy…..Whatever you might think of the saddos who enter the house for a bit of airtime, this year there are even bigger saddos outside of the house using the show as an opportunity to posture and pontificate.

As Carol Midgley wrote in The Times (London), the CBB people knew what they were doing when they stuck Jade Goody’s somewhat uncouth and rowdy family – including her loudmouth mum Jackiey Budden – into a house with sophisticated Shilpa: ‘Endemol has gone for the lowest common denominator: pit bull versus pedigree….And it isn’t the first time C4 producers have tried to ratchet up cultural tensions on the show.
In Big Brother 6 they put mouthy working-class girl Saskia in the house, who said in a pre-recorded video that she has concerns about ‘foreigners’ in Britain. ‘They all want to kill us, bomb us. I don’t want to generalise, but I do’, said the silly woman.

BB producers cynically invent conflict for entertainment purposes, and then have the gall to voice ‘crocodile concern’ (as Carol Midgley described it) when that conflict causes controversy. The current Jade v Shilpa spat is actually a product of reality TV’s cynical treatment of individuals as lab rats to be thrown together to see what happens.

Germaine Greer – one-time feminist author who, since her own appearance on CBB two years ago, is now better known as a commentator on all things reality TV-related – says the treatment of Shilpa Shetty isn’t that surprising because ‘this is a racist country. To the vast majority of couch potatoes out there, Shilpa is a “Paki bird”.’
Jade and Jo and Danielle are like the chubby girls in the class jealous of their tall, beautiful and sophisticated classmate….Shetty still has a proper career. They’re being bitchy rather than racist.

In a piece headlined ‘Beauty and the beastliness: a tale of declining British values’, Stuart Jeffries in the Guardian says ‘The Big Brother house remains one of hate, divided between ugly thick white Britain and one imperturbably dignified Indian woman.

Read the commentary at Celebrity - Big Brother: a Zzzz-list scandal. –

Additional read: Mick Hume – All the world’s a reality TV studio