Hugs, minus kisses, an Indian Press note

As every kultur pehlwan knows, any action or behaviour can be sold as part of ‘hamara’ culture or tradition once one decides to sell it that way. It is the prerogative of every individual of every society to, at least, situate one’s preferences as part of his or her culture. It provides one ballast. If you like to, say, drink soup from a straw instead of a spoon, you could say that such a way of intake is ‘part of our culture’. Take hugging. There’s nothing wrong or right with it – it’s the individual’s prerogative to hug (or be hugged/not hugged). So, if someone wonders why an Indian is a hughead – hugging everyone he or she meets – there is no real need to quickly say, ‘That’s because it’s in our culture, you dimwit!’ Either way, it doesn’t matter.

Traditionally, we men, not so much women, hug at a drop – on festive occasions and celebratory ones. Some of us still into newspaper-reading (an Indian ‘cultural thing’) remember Fidel Castro hugging Indira Gandhi, quite an anomaly in the political circuit. Yasser Arafat did the same, providing solid ground to state that hugging is as much a radical Left cultural thing as it is ‘Indian’. But used too many times and with everyone, the hug becomes much more about telling us the nature of the hugger and less about anything else, the nature of the relationship between hugger and huggee included.