Mata Amrita Goes To New York Times

Remember that I had written recently that the pandemic is likely to change the practice of hugging, and the Mata Amrita Index? Now the New York Times has also covered it (possibly paywalled). It includes helpful graphics on “how to hug and how not to hug”.

It is an interesting article, quoting an expert on aerosols about what is the best way to hug. From what I gather, the key is to keep your faces turned away from each other. As long as you maintain this, hugging should still be fine.

[…] the safest thing is to avoid hugs. But if you need a hug, take precautions. Wear a mask. Hug outdoors. Try to avoid touching the other person’s body or clothes with your face and your mask. Don’t hug someone who is coughing or has other symptoms.

And remember that some hugs are riskier than others. Point your faces in opposite directions — the position of your face matters most. Don’t talk or cough while you’re hugging. And do it quickly. Approach each other and briefly embrace. When you are done, don’t linger. Back away quickly so you don’t breathe into each other’s faces. Wash your hands afterward.

Most of this seems fine. Only the last bit seems a bit difficult to implement – how do you wash your hands soon after hugging someone without offending them? I mean – I face this problem already. There are many people I come across whose hands I shake (this is all pre-pandemic) which leave me queasy and at unease until I have washed my hands. The challenge in this situation is how to efficiently wash your hands without making it explicit that the handshake wasn’t a pleasant one.

My favourite bit in the article, however, is the last one. It pertains to the “quality of hugs” that I’ve been talking about for a while now, and also happens to bring in Marie Kondo into the picture.

Dr. Marr noted that because the risk of a quick hug with precautions is very low but not zero, people should choose their hugs wisely.

“I would hug close friends, but I would skip more casual hugs,” Dr. Marr said. “I would take the Marie Kondo approach — the hug has to spark joy.”

Mata Amrita in the time of Covid-19

You remember the Mata Amrita Index? I’d first defined it in early 2009, and it is broadly defined as “the likelihood that you will hug a randomly chosen friend or acquaintance you meet”. There is a bilateral version as well, which is defined as “the likelihood that a given pair of people will hug each other when they meet”.

I’ve revisited this concept several times on this blog. Once, I had wondered how you can go about “changing your MAI” with someone. On another occasion I had tried to add a quality dimension to the index, to account for the “quality of hugs”. But indices in general don’t do well when you try to complicate them too much.

In any case, I’ve been wondering how people’s MAI will evolve given the covid-19 crisis. I also wonder how the quality-adjusted MAI will evolve.

For one, Mumbai Mirror reports that Mata Amrita (in whose honour the index has been named) herself has been badly affected by the crisis.

“Like everywhere in the world, life in Kerala and the ashram have changed,” says the ‘hugging saint’, Mata Amritanandamayi, known to her devotees as ‘Amma’, over email. “This is the first time in more than 45 years that there has been no darshan.”

The crisis automatically means that we will, to the extent possible, try to avoid physical contact with other people. When shaking hands itself is frowned upon, hugs are out of the question. However, there will be people outside your immediate family with whom you would have developed a high bilateral MAI. How do you deal with them once you start meeting them again?

My guess is that the bilateral MAI will get sharply partitioned, and “collapse” (in a Schrödingerian sense). For people with whom you’ve had a high historical MAI, and where the historical quality has also been high, you are likely to take a “hell with the virus” approach and continue the (high quality) hugs.

Among other things these also tend to be the people you trust very well (why would you hug someone tightly if you don’t trust them?), and also there aren’t likely to be very many of them.

At the other end, anyone for whom historical bilateral MAI is not close to 1, or with whom the historical quality of hugs hasn’t been great, you’ll simply eschew the hug, going all the way to the namaste, maybe.

So all these “polite hugs” will disappear (which isn’t a bad thing at all, in my opinion). People will also feel less queasy about rejecting a hug – now they have a very good reason to do so.

The other thing is that you need a sort of “trust jump” with someone to get to a point where your MAI jumps from 0 to 1. The old progression (which was never a continuous progression) from handshake to side hug to quick hug to full hug is not going to be valid any more, as you need to directly jump from a zero MAI to a high quality one MAI.

Finally, what will happen of Mata Amrita herself? Is the dip in her “darshan” a temporary impact or a permanent impact? I suspect it’s the former?