Cele|bitchy | Richard Gere, Wanted Man (update: video)

An Indian court has issued a warrant for Richard Gere’s arrest for kissing Shilpa Shetty at a public event this month.

For those of you who need a refresher on who Shilpa Shetty is, she is a Bollywood actress that was the center of the whole Big Brother racial bullying drama in January. After the incident, she went from unknown to a household name in the UK, and she’s been keeping a low profile for a bit. I’m sure she won’t be happy to find herself embroiled in another controversy, but hey, at least it is with someone much more famous and better looking than Jade Goody.

Here’s the scoop from E! Online:

An Indian court has issued a warrant for Gere’s arrest in response to a complaint that the actor committed an “obscene act” by daring to smooch Bollywood star Shilpa Shetty at a public event earlier this month.

The problematic PDA went down at an HIV/AIDS awareness summit in New Delhi, where Gere swooped Shetty into his arms, dipped her, and planted kisses on her cheeks.

Devout Hindu groups were outraged by the act, which they saw as an insult to Indian culture and an affront to Shetty’s modesty. Posters of both Gere and Shetty were burned in effigy in several major cities.

At least three citizens took it one step further by filing legal complaints against the pair. After viewing video footage of the incident, Judge Dinesh Gupta agreed that the “highly sexually erotic” behavior exhibited by the twosome “transgressed all limits of vulgarity.”

Oh for goodness sake! I understand India has different customs from the rest of the world, and as such outsiders should respect them when they visit the country, but Richard Gere is not Akon — he didn’t dry hump Shilpa Shetty on stage! Richard Gere made a fairly simple mistake — even Shetty has defended his actions by saying he was only trying to reenact a scene from his film Shall We Dance, as he wanted to connect with the crowd and did not speak Hindi.