Richard Gere apologizes for Indian furor

Richard Gere tried to quell a storm in India over a public kiss he gave a Bollywood star at an AIDS awareness event, apologizing Friday for any offense.

Gere’s embrace and kiss of actress Shilpa Shetty last week sparked several noisy demonstrations by hard-line Hindu groups and a flurry of legal complaints, which ended with a judge in the northwestern city of Jaipur issuing an arrest warrant for the two stars for violating obscenity laws.

“What is most important to me is that my intentions as an HIV / AIDS advocate be made clear and that my friends in India understand that it has never been, nor could it ever be, my intention to offend you,” Gere said in statement issued by the Heroes Project, an organization the 57-year-old actor co-founded to combat AIDS in India. “If that has happened, of course it is easy for me to offer a sincere apology,” he said.

The embrace, in front of about 4,000 truckers, was a failed parody of a move from Gere’s film “Shall We Dance?” and “a naive misread of Indian customs,” he said.