First let me say that if a kiss from Richard Gere is among the perks of taking up the fight against AIDS, then consider me officially registered as an activist from this moment on. Lucky old Shilpa Shetty, for getting to kiss Richard Gere without even being known so far for having the slightest concern about AIDS. She was clearly delighted with her kiss, he seemed to enjoy himself, and that should have been that.

It was nothing more than a bit of harmless fun, but this is India, so it has become an issue of social mores and ‘Indian culture’.

So let’s talk a little about our ‘culture’ and the way we treat our women. Let’s begin with the role models from our two great epics and see how they were treated. Sita was kicked out of Rama’s palace because some gossipy old woman in Ayodhya cast aspersions on her chastity. Luckily, Sita was a goddess and could appeal to the Earth to swallow her up. In modern India, she would have ended up in a brothel or in the street. Homes for abandoned women are in short supply. The ones run by the state are so dodgy that women are better off in the street.

Then, there is Draupadi, gambled away like an old piece of furniture by one of the five husbands she was forced to marry and then stripped and humiliated in a king’s court. Krishna himself had to intervene to save her.

Let us come then to modern times. Are the men who were so offended by the kiss as to take the matter to court offended by the fact that more than 95 per cent of abortions in India are of baby girls? This well-known and very widespread practice we call ‘foeticide’ and it is marginally less cruel than infanticide. In those parts of India where ultrasound machines are not easily available, baby girls are killed to this day in horrible ways. In some districts of Tamil Nadu they are starved to death so it can take days for them to die. In other parts of our ‘civilised’ land there are other methods. Sometimes they are buried alive or poisoned with the first sip of food they get in their sad, little lives. Kinder people do it quickly by leaving it to the midwife to strangle the newborn to death.

... contd.