THE HUG

Everybody is so full of how a hug is an intimate show of affection and how a hug helps increase the warmth and love in a relationship, hugs for feeling safe and protected and showing that you care and so on. The internet is crowded with cute pictures of different creatures huddled together.

The act of hugging, apparently, feels so good, is so medically and socially beneficial, in fact, that certain people in our country had even carved out a living off it!

But no one seems to have mentioned the nightmarish ones (not to mention the handshakes that come in place of these hugs if it is a less intimate relationship; but that I will trouble you with another day). And honestly, I just keep bumping into these! I really am at the point of renunciation of all such human bodily contact if I can help it.

It isn’t that the intention behind any of these hugs is bad; it just isn’t those people’s forte. Though unfortunately, they seem to feel the need to perpetrate them most.

I am still recovering from a neck sprain, the consequence of a hug that a friend of mine imposed upon me today. No, no, I don’t mean any offense! She is the sweetest little soul I have had the privilege to be acquainted with. She flits into our day and out like a pixie; if I were writing poetry I might have even said that she breathes life into our dreary college days. But her hugs just make me wish I were Nearly Headless Nick.

Oh! But this is very far off course from “horrible and inescapable”. The real nightmares I have are at certain large family gatherings. Apart from all the introductions and “Hey, you remember me right! It’s so good to see you again”s from absolute strangers or similar looking siblings unfamiliar to me, the supposedly “brimming with affection” hugs from the closely related uncles are the most unfortunate. A lightening fast reflex to breathe in gallons of air and expand and harden your chest as much as possible is required to survive risk of being squashed like a bug. And then, of course, longer hugs are more intimate, aren’t they? Well, I don’t doubt that those hugs are meant to shower love and affection; I just feel that they aren’t done right. They seem more to be to the purpose of making my affection ooze out onto them rather than the other way round!

Among the non-lethal hugs would be the ones where the benevolent other has got to have either a blocked nose or a blocked brain; for they can’t smell themselves, who they’re at closest contact with. Or, the one where the other gets drunk over all the released oxytocin which in turn releases some sort of adhesive from their bodies. Or, the horrid intentional over exertion of force on you in the absence of the realisation that you are a human with skin and bones and flesh and nerves and are absolutely, decidedly not a pillow.

None of these hugs are bad or from bad people. But they’re worth avoiding and in my life at least, they’re most common. It is just that these people haven’t mastered the art of the hugging; the subtle balance of force, love and duration. Perhaps they ought to learn from certain experts. May I suggest the Hugging& Kissing Baba?