Shrugging off the hug

Getting hugged can be quite injurious to your health. For instance imagine being hugged by a bear. And people don’t call it Bear Hug for nothing. When the shaggy beast stops its PDA (public display of affection obviously. The bear won’t ring your bell, enter your house and lock you in its loving grip in private) , you will be reduced to chutney and won’t be around even to grin and bear it..

Not just bears but even human hugs can be problematic. Once the wife and me went to a wedding reception where I ran into an old friend. He hugged me and I reciprocated. After the guy left, my wife gave me an angry look. “Why did you guys hug each other?” she asked.

“Well we met after a long time. So we hugged each other in greeting” i said.
“Why the hell can’t you just say hi or hello. Men hugging in public is sort of weird”. I suspect she thought that the guy was gay and was making a pass at me
Look how injurious a hug proved to Arvind Kejriwal’s Mr.Clean image. The poor Delhi chief minister had to suffer the hug of Laloo Yadav of the fodder scam fame. And the photos of the two hugging went viral..

According to media reports, the poor chap tried to avoid Laloo like bubonic plague at the swearing in function of Bihar CM Nitish Kuma, who unfortunately depends on Laloo for survival. (Two of Laloos kids have been given ministries to play. Arvind constantly kept Mamata Bannerjee as a buffer between him and Laloo and studiously avoided eye contact with the Bihar strongman but he was a duffer to think that the buffer will remain there forever.

And so Mamata moved and Laloo hugged Arvind and the rest is history.

Now Arvind has few or no friends in Delhi’s poltical spectrum. So the hug was used by both the BJP which was reduced to a single digit in the Delhi assembly by Arvind’s AAP and the Congress which was reduced to zero to run Arvind down.. While BJP attacked Arvind for the hug, Congres very sweetly defended him saying there was nothing wrong with the hug because , now hold your breath LALOO AND ARVIND SHARED A COMMON IDEOLOGY.

What a lovely idea sirjee. To put fodder scam founding fodder oops sorry father Laloo and anti-corruption crusader Arvind at the same level. BJP bow down to Congress. You can’t demolish a guy like this with such sweet poison.

BJP as is its wont, handled the matter in a ham handed manner. That should hardly be surprising since the Sangh Parivar allegedly hates the community that abjures ham or any other pork product. Party workers held demonstrations in Delhi against the hug and said that the hug revealed Kejriwal in his true colours.BJP leaders went ballistic criticizing Kejriwal for hugging Laloo.

But tell me honestly. If you run into a person you detest at a party and that guys tries to show off his benevolent nature by hugging you, what would you do? Push him off with all the force you can gather or diplomatically smile that you don’t become a party pooper? I think unless you have had one peg too many, you would say cheese and try to move away as quickly as you can.

That is exactly what Arvind did. But Congress fearing that its tally will go in negative and BJP alarmed that Arvind is finally getting his act together in Delhi (His latest achievement is a flyover that cost Rs 104 crores less than its budgeted cost. This could have been possible only under squeaky clean government) are making a mountain out of molehill..

Now, this hug can be really turned into a roaring business. Laloo can become a WMD of reputations. He will hug anyone whom he or his allies want to be politically or socially destroyed and the reputation of the poor victims would touch the nadir. He can charge a fee per hug from the detractors of the person he hugged.

And hugging by some people , I suspect can have devastating even fatal consequences. We have a godwoman called Mata Amritanandamayi with a propensity for hugging her devotees. The gullible oops sorry devotees caught in her bear hug (she does look like a hairless bear) consider themselves blessed and on the fasttrack to nirvana.

Once she hugged some central Congress ministers somewhere in Kerala and this was made a joke of by the local Communists one of whom compared the lady to Kollywood bombshell Silk Smitha.

Silk Smitha must have heard this because soon after the incident, she committed suicide.

 

Vaidehi I am waiting for your second comment after you finish reading this.

 

Viji, welcome to my page after a looooooooooooooooooong time. I thin down douth people still find it embarrassing when two people hug in public, be it people of the same danger or different genders