BHOPAL: An alleged attempt by a young woman to garner maximum views on social media by covering her male friend’s car with 3,400 lipstick kiss marks has landed her friend in trouble in Madhya Pradesh’s Gwalior district.
Two days ago, Gwalior traffic police came across a popular video doing rounds on social media. The video showed a speeding white Swift car with its entire body covered with lipstick kiss marks.
A subsequent probe led police to the car’s owner, Aditya Sikarwar, a BA student residing in Gwalior’s Thatipur area.
The car was subsequently seized and brought to the Gwalior East Traffic Police Station. Its young owner was slapped with Rs 5,500 penalty and made to scrub the lipstick kiss marks off the entire car on Tuesday.
Apologising for the act, the student claimed that he had not applied the lipstick kiss marks on the car, but that they had been put there by his female friend.
“She (a female friend) had seen a popular video of some other country, which inspired her to replicate it on my car. She covered the entire car with lip kisses, using lipsticks costing Rs 800-900. She spent around 3.5 hours in covering the entire car with red lip kisses and then asked me to post it on social media.
But I had never even imagined that it would land me in trouble. The police seized the car, called me to the police station, and slapped me with a Rs 5,500 penalty. I had to scrub and clean the entire car of the 3400 lip kiss marks put by my female friend. I appeal to one and all not to commit any such act for making big in the virtual world (social media),” the car’s owner Aditya Sikarwar told journalists on the premises of the Gwalior East Traffic Police Station on Tuesday.
Importantly, by the time the unusual development attracted the police’s attention, the “Kissing Car” reel had clocked around 55 lakh views in just two days. Reportedly having an Instagram follower base of 2,952 and 64 posts, Aditya subsequently blocked the Instagram account.
Gwalior Traffic Police Station in-charge Abhishek Raghuvanshi said the video had surfaced on social media around two days earlier and showed the lipstick-covered Swift allegedly speeding through the Patel Nagar-City Center area. Police began gathering information from the video to establish the identity and location of the vehicle. Their investigation eventually led them to Thatipur. Once the vehicle and driver were traced, police imposed a fine of approximately Rs 5,500 under various provisions of the Motor Vehicles Act.
“He (Aditya) has admitted to the mistake and personally cleaned the lipstick marks from the car’s body inside the police station premises,” Raghuvanshi said.
The police said Aditya is an Instagram content creator and that the bizarre act was aimed at increasing his reach and followers on social media.
