Pucker up and face the truth, guys. Irrespective of how blasé actors might seem, Bollywood still squirms over a good, heavy-duty kiss on screen.

Take the famous Dhoom:2 smooch, for instance. While Aishwarya and her besotted husband have not been available for answers since the release of the film, Hrithik Roshan himself (Ash’s kissing partner in Dhoom:2) was a bundle of contradictions. As is his wont, he first went into an elaborate explanation of how wife Sussanne had told him that if he had to kiss on screen he’d better make sure that it was the best kissing scene ever filmed in Hindi cinema. After he’d kissed his co-star to his wife’s satisfaction, came his observation that it wasn’t really a kiss of passion but, “A beautiful cinematic moment.” A little more questioning on whether he was embarrassed or self-conscious while shooting the sequence (after all it was his first-ever before the camera), Hrithik shrugged, “Come on, it was just another scene. Why make such a big deal of it? We actors treated it like any other scene.” Oh yeah?

That’s why the sets were cleared and only a handful essential to the shoot were around when they shot the scene. That’s why everybody was sworn to secrecy and not allowed to breathe a word about the Ash-Hrithik kiss before its release. That’s why questions on the scene aren’t entertained by Ash or Abhishek. Really guys, why so much fuss over just another scene?

Of course, Abhishek was irked even when asked about his dad’s first screen kiss — with Rani Mukherjee in Black. Since he didn’t want to be rude and refuse to answer it, Abhishek preferred not to call it a kiss but a “disturbing moment” on celluloid. “You could imagine the tension in Dr Sahai during that scene,” he commented, leaving the how-could-you-even-call-it-a-kiss part of his sentence unsaid. With the irritability so palpable, you couldn’t even probe further and ask how it felt to watch his dad in Black, especially since Abhishek himself had smooched the same co-star (Rani) so thoroughly one year ago in Bunty Aur Babli!

In a recent interview to me, Amitabh Bachchan extolled his screen romance with Tabu in Cheeni Kum when he pointed out, “Everybody talks about how wonderful this romance was, but do you realise there wasn’t a single kiss or anything physical in it?” Since he’d mentioned kissing, that left the field open for a quick query on his turning into quite a specialist in kissing scenes. Characteristically, he was poker-faced as he replied, “No, I have not” (turned into any such specialist). When reminded that he had kissed in Black and Nishabd, Amitabh Bachchan simply helped himself to Hrithik Roshan’s vocabulary and replied, “It was not a kiss. (Tongue-in-cheek, not angrily) I’m disappointed if you think that scene in Black was a kiss. It was a brilliant moment, a cinematic moment. In Nishabd it was more her (Jiah Khan) who came and did it, it wasn’t like passion, it was just that little moment.” Never mind if those moments never figured in AB’s career for over 30 years and even Jumma chumma de de didn’t culminate in a chumma!

The latest is Vidya Balan. Even while frolicking in bed with Saif Ali Khan in Parineeta in what was conveyed as a full-fledged consummation of their passion, Vidya had refused to kiss her co-star. Mentor Pradeep Sarkar had indulged her but Mani Ratnam did not when he got her to kiss R. Madhavan, full-on, eyes closed, lip-to-lip and a little more in Guru. But quiz her on it and Vidya is almost admonishing in her answer (like Hrithik, Abhishek, Amitabh). “Nobody else has ever asked me about that scene,” she replies. “Please don’t call it a kiss! It was very aesthetically done and not for titillation. The kiss signified the guy breathing life into the girl’s character.” Using the Bachchan-Roshan lingo, Vidya describes the kiss as, “A true moment of cinema which can’t be clubbed with all the other kisses we have seen on screen. I decided to do it because of its value in the story.” Gosh, how clueless we’ve been.

R. Madhvan liplocked with Vidya and we didn’t even realise its true value!

That way at least Preity Zinta didn’t get self-righteous after she kissed Saif (several times) in the live-in story, Salaam Namaste. “When others have kissed 17 times in one film, at least I’ve kissed only in one out of 17 films!” she laughed it off.

Unlike dad Dharmendra and bhai Sunny, the junior most Deol had avoided kissing on screen until Bobby got desperate enough to covet a Yashraj film. And so he did that ---g, never-ending smooch with Lara Dutta in Jhoom Barabar Jhoom — not that it saved the actor or the film from doom.

Everybody’s doing it, so you can’t be left out. Yet Bollywood squirms uncomfortably and turns indignant, using phrases like “cinematic moment” instead of just saying, yeah, we’ve all started smooching because it’s the kiss of life for our careers, even if it doesn’t really help our films at the box office. Really, at least Emraan Hashmi has been a lot less hypocritical about kissing and owning up!

Bharathi S. Pradhan is managing editor of Movie Mag International