Tag: affection

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?

Mata Amrita Index needs a new dimension

Some of the hugs look too flimsy for a 10-year reunion
– Pinky

As anyone here who has tried to construct an index will know, any index, however well constructed, will end up being way too simplistic, and abstract away way too much information. This is especially true of indices that are constructed as weighted averages of different quantities, but even indices with more “fundamental” formulae are not immune to this effect.

Some eight years ago, I constructed an index called the “Mata Amrita Index“, which my good friend Sangeet describes as the “best ever probabilistic measure” he’s come across. It’s exactly that – a probabilistic measure.

Quoting from the blog post where I introduced the concept:

The Mata Amrita Index for a person is defined as the likelihood of him or her hugging the next random person he/she meets.

Actually over time I’ve come to prefer what I’d called the “bilateral MAI”, which is the probability that a given pair of people will hug each other the next time they meet. The metric has proved more useful than I had initially imagined, and has in a way helped me track how some friendships are going. So far so good.

But it has a major shortcoming – it utterly fails to capture quality. There are some people, for example, who I don’t hug every time I meet them, but on the random occasions when we do hug, it turns out to be incredibly affectionate and warm. And there are some other people, with whom my bilateral MAI tends to 1, but where the hug is more of a ritual than a genuine expression of affection. We hug every time, but the impact of the hug on how I feel is negligible.

In fact, I’d written about this a couple years back, that when the MAI becomes too high, the quality and the impact of the hug inevitably suffers. Apart from the ritualness of the hug robbing it of the warmth, a high MAI also results in lack of information flow – you know you hug as a rule, so the hug conveys no information.

So, now I want to extend the MAI (all good index builders do this – try to extend it when they realise its inadequacies) to incorporate quality as well. And like any index extension, the problem is to be able to achieve this without making the index too unwieldy. Right now, the index is a probabilistic measure, but not that hard to understand. It’s also easy to adjust your bilateral MAI with someone every time you meet.

How do you think I can suitably modify the MAI to bring in the quality aspect? One measure I can think of is “what proportion of the time when you meet do you hug, and it makes you feel real good?”. As you can see it’s already complicated, but this brings in the quality component. The ritual hug with the high MAI counterparty makes no impact on you, so your modified MAI with that person will be low.

The problem with this Modified MAI (MMAI) is that it is automatically capped by the MAI, given the “AND” condition in its definition. So a person you hug infrequently, but feel incredibly good after each such hug, will have a low MMAI with you – it’s more to do with the low frequency of hugging than the quality.

If you can think of a more elegant measure, do let me know! Whoever said building an index is a simple process!