On Tue, Jun 09, 2009 at 04:41:50PM +0530, Lahar Appaiah wrote: > On Tue, Jun 9, 2009 at 4:05 PM, Pranesh Prakash > <[email protected]>wrote: > > A friend recently asked me if belief in 'jhoota'/'yechal' meant that a > > person couldn't kiss another! > > This whole kissing thing is a Western concept, and is against Indian > culture. I agree with Pranesh that if someone really believes in our > traditions, they should not kiss.
Do you just mean among people who aren't exchanging other bodily fluids? Because, unless Richard Burton introduced the bits about kissing in his translation, kissing between lovers has many centuries of history in India. (Or was Vātsyāyana influenced by "Western concepts"?) It is really difficult to find any concepts that don't exist *somewhere* in Indian history. How old is the jhoota concept? I am guessing India didn't wait for Pasteur to discover that drinking other people's saliva was unhealthy. Even though I didn't grow up in an Indian family, I did grow up with the idea that drinking someone else's drink or eating someone else's food was sort of unclean and polluting. Later, I mostly became assimilated into mainstream American society. No herpes yet! > KISS is also an American heavy metal band with widespread notoriety. > The name was supposed to be an anagram for Knights in Satan's Service. They are mostly notorious because their music is bad. Wikipedia claims that the acronym claims are all wrong. Kragen
