Her face is awash in affection and what I can only describe as relief, as if she were embracing a long-lost son. To watch Mata Amritanandamayi, or Amma, the so-called hugging saint, in action, is to see anew the most ordinary of human gestures. Seated on a squat throne covered with a pink sari and festooned with flowers on a stage in a Best Western banquet hall in suburban Massachusetts, India's most gregarious spiritual guru is mobbed by handlers and followers who have waited in line for hours to fall into her arms.
But despite the crowds in the hall, and the bazaar-like sprawl of vendors hawking T-shirts and mango lassis to benefit Amma's charities, it's hard to peel your eyes away from the woman herself.
Or should I say the hug. When I arrive on a stifling Tuesday evening, she's working her way through a line of several hundred people. She'll keep hugging strangers without so much as a bathroom break until around 5 A. Amma the name means "mother" in various languages , 60, has espresso-colored skin, a blingy nose ring, a round face framed by gray wisps of hair, and eyes that sparkle with near-constant delight. On a mission to comfort her children, i. In some ways the hugging seems too commercial, too easy, too cute it's been called "about as challenging and exotic as a Hershey's Kiss".
Shortly after 10am, Amma arrived on stage and began leading a meditation. Entry to the event was free and, by the time the hugging started, the hall was full of people queueing for tokens, like the ones you get when waiting at a deli. The hugging itself was a well-organised, slick operation with the numbers displayed on a large screen, indicating when you should start to line up. Amma has been known to hug for 17 hours straight, without a bathroom break or food.
As our section was called and Ro and I moved up the queue, I felt an increasing sense of excitement. Unlike other religious services that can feel a bit formless and impersonal, this was deeply personal — a physical union between the guru and follower in the form of an embrace. After all this waiting, suddenly we were on stage, only a few hugs away from Amma.
Up there it was like being in hive. There was a man crouching behind her with a stopwatch — or was it a counter? There were others in prayer. There were people sorting a container of sweets and a container of rose petals. There were people who wiped your face with a paper towel, to get rid of makeup. There were people who removed and held your glasses as you hugged Amma. There were people filming.
There were two people young, western, in their 20s at her feet. The energy of the people around her, the hours-long wait, the journey to this faraway for me harness racing track, the swirling, hypnotic chanting in Sanskrit by a live band on the hall floor, all of it coalesced into a sort of overwhelming field of energy. I put my arms out as instructed and gripped the ballast that was either side of her.
The vast event room was overflowing, with attendees sitting bolt-upright on red chairs, eyes shining. But for many of you it must have felt like a very long year.
While outside of India, Amma is admired for her New Age veneer and a seemingly ecumenical approach — including a Christmas pageant at her ashram in Kerala, and a repeated insistence on unity — both her spiritual lexicon and political vocabulary are uniformly Hindu. This is the rough equivalent of a Texas politician citing the Bible as a guide to health care policy.
Even a push toward a vegetarian diet can quickly go political in India. Almost all the violence has taken place after Modi assumed office in On June 22, a Muslim teen who was returning home from Eid shopping on the outskirts of Delhi was fatally stabbed by a mob of train passengers, witnessed hurling religious insults. They had come to escape from politics, after all. Of Beastly Times. Strongmen and Fragile Democracies.
By Anita Felicelli. By Arvind Rajagopal.
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