A kiss is just a kiss ... unless it is in the land of the RSS

Growing up in a traditional Tamil Brahmin family, I easily gravitated to the classical music that was the cultural lifeblood in the immediate and extended families.  A favorite of mine was a Bharatiyar poem set to music in the classical style, and the following lines when talented musicians would get into a jam session, as we might refer to it:

கன்னத்தில் முத்தமிட்டால்-உள்ளந்தான்   கள்வெறி கொள்ளுதடீ 
உன்னை தழுவிடிலோ- கண்ணம்மா  உன்மத்த மாகுதடீ. 

In this movie clip, that verse is when the male voice kicks in (at 2:25)

Those lines are about how the lover's heart feels intoxicated with a kiss, and about an embrace that is sensual.

The strangest aspect was this: as a kid, I had never seen in real life lovers kissing or passionately embracing.  Yet, here were these lyrics by Bharatiyar, who was a Tamil Brahmin himself, and whose hometown was not far from my grandmothers'.  There was no kissing in the public, or anything even remotely passionate an embrace, not only among the Tamil Brahmins but pretty much by anybody.  Those days, movies did not show kissing either.

To think that in my young days in the old country I had missed out on all the kissing and embracing, and the getting to first and second base that is all the norm for American teenagers!!!  What a loss! ;)

Kissing is in the news in India.  For the wrong reasons though:

To assert their right to love following an attack at a coffee shop in Kerala's Kozhikode district last week by the BJP activists, a group of youngsters in Kochi have decided to observe the next Sunday as 'Kiss Day'.

Yep, when a religious-nationalist is elected to power, then moral policing automatically follows.  To fight back, they have come up with a wonderful idea:

The event named Kiss of Love has been organised by a group of youngsters and invites everyone, old and young, to gather at the Marine Drive on Sunday evening and express their love in public. There is an air of excitement in the city and the social media is awash with youngsters confirming their participation. More than 2,500 people have registered for the event, while the likes have crossed 7000 and going up, something which even the organisers never expected. 

Source

While the initial trigger--the attack in the coffee shop--was led by Hindu activists, the "Kiss of Love" is opposed by the Muslim moral police too!

The "kiss of love" protest has been opposed by both hardline Hindu and Muslim groups in Kerala who say the event is against Indian culture.

Yep, the kissing version of Bootleggers and Baptists!

Of course, it being the India where there are taboos in plenty against young men and women socializing, it should not surprise anybody that:

Many others on the net, boys and girls included, have expressed their willingness and excitement to take part in the event, but alas they are without partners.

The old country is beyond anybody's understanding.

World Classical Tamil Conference

Tamil is a rich language outside the Indo-Latin family of languages, and with a lengthy history that makes it the oldest "living" language with that kind of a long history in literature.

I suppose it is more for theatre and politics that a World Classical Tamil Conference is underway in the town where I did my undergraduate studies--Coimbatore.  (the photo here is from The Hindu, which had the following caption: A woman sells snacks at the venue of the World Classical Tamil conference. Photo: S.Siva Saravanan)

Professor Parpola said Sanskrit, with its 3,000-year-old tradition, had produced an unrivalled number of literary works. It went back to Proto-Indo-Aryan [which was] attested in a few names and words related to the Mitanni kingdom of Syria between 1500 and 1300 BCE, and earlier forms of Indo-Iranian, known only from a few loanwords in Finno-Ugric languages as spoken in central Russia around 2000 BCE.

“But, none of these very earliest few traces is older than the roots of Tamil. Tamil goes back to Proto-Dravidian, which, in my opinion, can be identified as the language of the thousands of short texts in the Indus script, written during 2600-1700 BCE. There are, of course, different opinions, but many critical scholars agree that even the Rigveda, collected in the Indus Valley about 1000 BCE, has at least half a dozen Dravidian loanwords,” he told a large gathering. 

 So, on this occasion, here is a song/dance clip from an old Tamil movie.  The song is, well, actually a poem by Subramanya Bharathi (ignore the words that pop up in the video with that song--it does great disservice to the poetry.  Click here for translation(s))