Just Saying | The world needs more Modi-style male bonding diplomacy
Yonden Lhatoo looks at the state and significance of male-to-male physical contact between world leaders, and takes his hat off to India’s prime minister
If you’ve ever lived or travelled in India, you’ll have noticed that it’s quite common for young men to walk hand in hand.
Not only that, they interlace fingers, or grasp each other’s pinkies, and swing their arms in wide arcs, like schoolgirls off to a picnic, minus the skipping.
There are other variations, such as walking around leaning heavily on each other’s shoulder, with heads touching sometimes, or with arms wrapped around each other’s waists in a semi-embrace.
No, it doesn’t mean they’re gay couples, even if it appears so to those of us who have adopted or were brought up with Western heteronormative social mores. And the homophobes need not snigger.
In a country that once gave us the Kama Sutra but is now highly conservative, especially over women, male-to-male public displays of affection can be more acceptable than male-to-female.
This is not a phenomenon unique to India – it’s prevalent in some other Asian, Middle Eastern and European countries, too.