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My Friend Sancho
My first book, My Friend Sancho, was published in May 2009, and went on to become the biggest selling debut novel released that year in India. It is a contemporary love story set in Mumbai, and had earlier been longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize 2008. To learn more about the book, click here.
If you're interested, do join the Facebook group for My Friend Sancho
Click here for more about my publisher, Hachette India.
My posts on India Uncut about My Friend Sancho can be found here.
Recent entries
I have three hypothetical questions for you guys. Humour me and try and read all the way through. One.…
I was on a CNN-IBN show earlier this evening, where the topic under discussion was the arrest of two…
I suppose I should display some empathy here, but I can’t help but be a little amused by the…
’Before anyone else was interested in the ornithology of terror he saw the gathering birds,’ Salman Rushdie writes about…
Check out this TED Talk by Tony Porter on how men get trapped in a ‘Manbox’—and women bear the…
10 February, 2009
“Kissing Is A Vedic Habit”
Behaviour analysts are also divided on where the habit [of kissing] originated. Some believe that kissing, in fact, is a Vedic habit. Vaughn Bryant, an anthropologist from Texas quoted in the International Herald Tribune, believes that the first recorded kiss, around 1500 BC, is in scriptures which mention people sniffing with their mouths; later Vedic texts describe lovers “setting mouth to mouth”.
Far from being a European import, he says, kissing went west from India, after Alexander’s conquest of Punjab in 326 BC. If such is the case then the Romans and Latins, whose kisses range from the overtly sexual to the deeply spiritual, are truly the kissing cousins of the Aryans.
Just imagine kissing going west. Savita Bhabhi, in an earlier birth, is carrying it with her. She is stopped by US customs. Anything to declare? asks the customs officer. Yes, says Savita Bhabhi. Lean forward.
(HT: Salil. More on Savita Bhabhi: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12.)
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