At the end of the day of giving free hugs, I got a text from my sister with a screenshot of an email that said
'There's a guy running around giving free hugs. Can someone put me in touch with him?'

My sister gave her my email, and she emailed me saying she was a reporter for the Daily (the stanford newspaper) and wanted to interview me about the Free Hugs day. Turns out I had hugged her that day and she thought it was a wonderful idea.

I met her, and she basically had 2 questions:

1. How many hugs did you give?
2. What inspired you?

For the first question, I was prepared - I expected she'd ask something like that and I just shook my head and said "that is not important - and I honestly don't know. I wasn't counting". She still pushed it - dozens of hugs? hundreds of hugs? 30 or 50 or 70?
Thank goodness I had thought this one out - all I said was, it was really the intention of spreading kindness, not the hugs themselves that were important. If I had given 1 hug, I would have been just as happy as if I gave everybody in Stanford a hug.

For the second question - I wasn't prepared. I didn't know how to answer that question - inspiration comes from so many places at once and flows through you in ways that are hard to understand. What do I include? This could be a life story, starting with my dad's amazing hugs ending with me wanting to share them with everyone, or a product of my summer with ServiceSpace, or just an expression of all the love I've ever received, or it could be Tim's free compliments day, or it could be the kindness circle at the Waldorf or ... ad infinitum.

I gave a really garbled answer, but then took a step back and thought - what story did I want to tell?

I grappled with this a lot - I wanted to give credit where it was due, but I also wanted to keep the thing light - I just wanted to be a guy who got up one day and decided to give out free hugs. In a way, I felt explaining less about the inspiration kept the integrity of the day intact. For some reason, I didn't mind explaining to people with my words, but having it put into writing was too weird.

Then the next day there was a mini photo shoot to get a picture of me 'in action' so to speak.

Again, I went along with it, but I'm not sure I should have. For one, not having my picture in the article would go a long way to keeping the story from being 'Vishesh gave hugs' when it should be 'a guy gave free hugs'. Second, the pictures felt forced, not like I was really expressing myself, but molding myself for someone else's perspective.

I'm not sure I did the right thing here by agreeing to an interview, but I guess all I can do is wait for the article to come out and hope for the best. In a way I feel I removed any bit of the anonymous part of the anonymous act of kindness.

What do you all of you think?