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Hugs and Kisses
For a long time I never knew why some people signed off their letters with xoxo until I asked someone. That person smiled at me and said, “Its hugs and kisses, you silly !”.
Doh! It dawned on me then. So I did a bit of research and here is what I found -
Hugs and Kisses is a term for a sequence of the letters X and O, e.g. XOXO, typically used by lovers to express affection at the end of a written letter or email.
It is debatable which letter represents which act. Some interpret X as the crossed arms of a hug and O as the puckered lips of a kiss. However, the interpretation assumed in the following, in which X represents the four lips of a kiss and O the four arms of a hug, is more common.
The use of XOXO goes back to the use of an X or cross, which was considered as good as a sworn oath in times before most people could write and therefore used the X in the same way a signature is used today — a mark of one’s word.
An X at the end of a letter or document was often kissed as a seal of honesty, in much the same way one would kiss a Bible or kiss the fingers after making the sign of the cross, thus the X came to represent a kiss in modern times.
The origins of the O as a hug are not generally known, although it is speculated that it may represent the arms wrapped around someone being hugged. Another thought is that it came from Jewish immigrants who would sign with an O instead of an X because they did not wish to mark their word with the obviously non-Jewish cross the X represented.
It is also said that X represents kisses because the letter X in Spanish is named “equis” which has a similar pronunciation as “a kiss”.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hugs_and_Kisses
They toll for me !!
No, I am not discussing the 1940 Ernest Hemingway’s book here. The bells here toll for my impending wedding. Date ? Hmmmm… will be finalized soon and I will update it here.
Am I happy ? Yes, I am and feel contentment.
This pic says it all. The serenity of the Himalayan mountains as a backdrop to the bells.
The British Medical Journal Lancet recently carried a study which reported the human male species would be redundant and extinct in the future. I’ll let this strip say -
Per Merriam-Webster dictionary -
Etymology: Sanskrit mAyA
: the sense-world of manifold phenomena held in Vedanta to conceal the unity of absolute being; broadly : ILLUSION
To say maya is an illusion is to not grasp the meaning and purport of the word. And each person is engulfed in a maya of their own creation.
So, why did I choose my blog name as mayaravi ? To put simply, were it not for maya I would not have felt the desire to vent and hence to blog.
Vani said she is working on the vipassana article and was confident she would get it published soon. I will include the link to it.
Vipassana helped me understand maya and how to come to terms with the influence and the effect maya has in my life. 
