NEW DELHI — Information and Broadcasting Minister Priya Ranjan Dasmunshi yesterday deplored the tendency of television channels to sensationalise trivial incidents, wondering aloud how "28 seconds of Shilpa Shetty kissing" qualified as breaking news throughout the day.

"28 seconds of Shilpa Shetty kissing was shown 28 times, 48 times, 88 times, even 100 times. Is it for commercial purposes, TRP purposes? In a country of one billion people, I don't know how this becomes breaking news," asked the minister at a seminar here to commemorate World Press Freedom Day.

Dasmunshi was referring to the much-publicised kissing incident between Hollywood actor Richard Gere and Indian film star Shilpa Shetty at a function here to raise Aids awareness among truckers last month that led Hindu nationalists to demand Gere's arrest for violating Indian culture.

‘Lunatic fringe’

Meanwhile, Bollywood actress Shilpa Shetty yesterday blamed India’s “lunatic fringe” for an uproar over enthusiastic kisses bestowed on her by Hollywood heart-throb Richard Gere at an Aids charity event.

An Indian court last week issued a warrant of arrest for Gere on charges of “obscene” behaviour after the televised embrace in which the star bent Shetty backwards on stage and kissed her repeatedly. Shilpa, 31, who is in Australia to promote her latest film, said the kisses had been “blown out of all proportion” and Gere “was just being very sweet.”

“The media tends to get slightly irresponsible at times but that’s the price one has to pay for celebrity,” she said.
“The majority of Indians don’t feel that way. It was the lunatic fringe that took over. This whole moral brigade got some momentum and some people who had political affiliations got some mileage out of it as well from my profile, and Richard’s.”