Chennai: The ‘Kiss of Love’ fever has finally arrived in Chennai. Over 100 students from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT-M), Madras, got together inside their campus on Friday to kiss and hug in support of a movement that took off in Kochi a month ago and has since spread across the city. Even as sceptical onlookers gazed on, a group of 50 students took to the lawn near the Himalaya mess facility and hugged and kissed one another. As the frenzy grew, more students joined the group and slogans were raised, ‘Allow us to kiss in open’, and ‘Ban moral policing’.

“Students expressed their wish that the community encourage openness. Banning kissing in the name of moral policing will be a deterrent to an open society,” Pallavi Chakravorty, the first woman speaker of the Student Affairs Council (SAC) at IIT-M, said. Shravan, a B.Tech student who took part in the protest, questioned the rationale of banning kissing in public in the name of tradition. “When your sons/daughters go abroad, they kiss and hug, you accept that, but you make a big hue and cry when they do it here. We are not doing something forbidden by law. This is a way to express our love.”

Not everyone went along with the plea to allow kissing in public. “Embracing something from a foreign culture will not help us; the crime rate too could go up if people indulge in acts like these. Love can be expressed in other better ways,” Suman, another student, said. The movement began in Kochi when activists across Kerala decided to protest against a series of moral policing incidents by organising a public event at Marine Drive beach on November 2, called “Kiss of Love”. It soon spread across the country like a forest fire.