This is obscene. The way we get our priorities mixed up is seriously obscene and disturbing. A bunch of people — clueless retards, more descriptively — get offended by some Hollywood actor kissing some silly young woman on the cheek in public and publicly protest what they call an attack on their cultural ethos. Worse yet, a case if filed in some court and the judge orders the woman to appear in court and orders that the actor be arrested if he sets foot in India.
That case should have been thown out and the litigant(s) assessed punitive damages for wasting the court’s time with a nuisance suit. With all due respect, I think the judge who admitted the case is acting like an idiot and steps should be taken to review whether he is entirely sane.
I feel embarrassed by all this because this gives India and Indians very bad press. A friend in the US, Myke, wrote to me informing me that a radio station in LA carried a news report which said:
Gere Faces Arrest in IndiaRicardo Vazquez Reporting
LOS ANGELES, CA (KNX) — Last week protestors took to the street and burned effigies of Richard Gere and Shilipa Shetty, an Indian pop star that won “Celebrity Big Brother” in Britain. The protests erupted after Gere repeatedly kissed Shetty on the cheek at an event aimed at increasing HIV awareness.Protestors said that Gere’s actions were “an attack on our cultural ethos”, according to a report in the Times of India. The matter has now landed in the courts.
An Indian judge watched a video of the incident and ruled that Gere violated India’s laws against public obscenity. The court ordered Shetty to appear on May 5th and that Gere be arrested.
Gere is not currently in India, but if he returns he can be detained and would face up to three months in jail, fines, or both.
Myke added that the government was protecting me and that I should be grateful. My response was to play down the damage. I wrote back:
“Yes, I am grateful that the people care so much about morality. Seriously though, it is making a mountain of a molehill. Sure a bunch of jobless idiots are protesting something — but the report gives the mistaken impression as if hundreds of millions of people are invovled. True, there are idiots in India but in pretty much the same relative numbers as are found in any other population. Because of India’s size, even vanishingly small percentage numbers translate into very large absolute numbers. That makes news, while the big story that the large majority could not care less would not be interesting at all.”
I think the true obscenity is when our courts have a backlog of 300 years of cases; I think it is obscene the way the people at large and the courts don’t take cognizance of the corruption that pervades the body politic; I think it is obscene that some people protest public kissing but have little to say about public molestation of women.
At some level I don’t really care if the rest of the world sees Indians as a bunch of puritanical repressed retards. What I care about is that we appear to have lost our sense of balance and forgotten what our priorities ought to be.