" 

 == Edit request dated 2nd October on the ""Kiss"" Talk page == 

 Hi Hitsuji Kinno! 

 I’m the person who made the edit request regarding the Indian “origins” of kissing on the 2nd of October 2013, which Stfg saw to on the 6th of the same month. 

 I’ve had reason to check up on this page and these kind of things in general on Wikipedia. If you go to the Talk page of the Wikipedia article “Man”, you’ll be able to read all about it. Let me give it to you in short. There is a group (a large one at that) of Indians who indulge in boosterism (as I’ve learnt to call it) on the net in general and Wikipedia in particular. The idea is solely to claim India as the origin of a whole gamut of things without any real scholarship at all to back those claims or very poor scholarship (when there is ambiguity). Furthermore, they will not argue rationally and will literally stop at nothing to propagate what they wish to be known to the world at large. 

 Now, let’s get to the “kiss” issue. Citation No. 5, which was in the article when I’d made the request, did not mention the Vedas. Citation No. 6 on the present page does mention what you say. Firstly, the West in general misunderstands India, and what is not understood too well is often glorified. Traditional Indians don’t know when to begin dating their texts; they were either there right from the beginning of the universe (I’m not kidding!) or date to some hoary antiquity which you and I can’t imagine. The discovery of the Indus Valley Civilization brought western historians to about the date 1500 BC for the composition of the Rig Veda (and hence the start of the Aryan period in India). It is acknowledged that the last of the four Vedas, the Atharva Veda, was composed in about 1000 BC, the Yajur Veda about 1200 BC and the Sama Veda somewhere between the Rig Veda and the Yajur Veda. It is also universally accepted that the four Vedas were composed before any of the other (numerous) works. The impression that the line you have quoted gives is that there were four texts from 1500 BC which talk about kissing. Even if I am wrong here, the fact remains that Citation No. 6 does not give any lines from the texts which would verify this. I have read parts of the Rig Veda and I did come across a few lines exhorting men and women to copulate in the sunshine (or something like that, if I remember correctly), but nothing about kissing per se. The lines from the Song of Solomon have been quoted in the Wikipedia article and the sources are genuine sources (one primary and the other a published secondary one). Surely Citation No. 6 cannot be taken seriously. It’s basically another ten-slide affair, with no citations of its own. Correct me if I’m wrong, but this is not the kind of citation which Wikipedia should have to offer the general public. 

 It’s also a matter of commonsense and rationality, if you really think about it. Kissing would rank, in my opinion, along with some other human achievements (like language, agriculture, etc.) which could be called basic/natural, in that it would be absurd to try to trace them to a single common source. These things developed in different places along different lines and at different times. It seems ridiculous to state that the Greeks and Romans had to wait till they heard of kissing from India. (Ovid's ""Art of Love"" predates the Kamasutra by at least two centuries!) And what about the Egyptians, who have an attested history going back to 3000 BC and who gave us the modern romantic notion of the wedding ring? Also, given that (i) the use of the mouth to taste, and (ii) the fact that the genitals in human beings are so located that intercourse would naturally lead to licking, sucking and kissing are both biological notions that are probably as old as the human race, wouldn’t it again be ludicrous to think that only a mere two to three millenia ago (which is 0.1% of the history of the human race as we know it today), people started to kiss, and that too in one geographical location? India, Greece, Ancient Rome and Egypt are all either tropical countries or close enough to the tropics. It would make more sense that peoples living in frigid conditions (like the Eskimos) would have felt the need to indulge in kissing out of sheer necessity (both as a means of increasing body warmth and as a reminder that one is not alone in a harsh Arctic land).  

 Basically, one should be careful in today’s internet world, where everybody has a lot to say but very, very little of it is of any worth. I repeat: 1) I believe that the claims do not hold water; 2) The purported “lines” from the texts are neither quoted nor are the “source citations” convincing to any degree; 3) I believe that this is part of Indian boosterism, either by Indians themselves or non-Indians who don't really know much about India. If you read what is there on the Talk page of “Man” and check Jimmy Wales’ Talk page