After several friends swear Amma's hugs are blissful, transcendent, a high that lingers, I grow curious. It makes sense that anyone who has done something 33 million times would be exceptionally good at it. "If a mother has a sick child, she'll stay up for three days straight in the hospital." "The power of love can make you do anything," explains Swamini Krishnamrita Prana, one of Amma's 14 orange-robed monks, many of whom travel with her. Aides say she gets less than two hours of sleep a night, if she sleeps at all. She was born in a poor fishing village in Kerala, where it was frowned upon for women to touch others. But that Amma has made a life out of hugging millions of people all over the world is nothing short of amazing. 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"). On a mission to comfort her children, i.e., humanity, she has given more than 33 million hugs, to poor villagers in India, to orphans in Kenya, to Sharon Stone.
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. She'll keep hugging strangers without so much as a bathroom break until around 5 A.M., as she has done most nights for the past four decades, each embrace more fierce and fervent than the last. When I arrive on a stifling Tuesday evening, she's working her way through a line of several hundred people. 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. 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. To watch Mata Amritanandamayi, or Amma, the so-called hugging saint, in action, is to see anew the most ordinary of human gestures. Her face is awash in affection and what I can only describe as relief, as if she were embracing a long-lost son. She's putting muscle into it, cocking her head to the left and pressing her cheek to his forehead, whispering urgently in his ear.
The first time I see her, she's clutching a man to her bosom, has him in a headlock, really-only his white mop of hair is visible.
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