Discovery of Smile

This is something from my personal blog that I am pasting here.

The first time I attempted to write something on smile was at my school. I remember not feeling any reason to smile as I, as did most others, struggled to find 120 words to finish up the write-up demanded by our teacher. While she wasn’t generally all that well liked by the boys in the school (I was an exception), she was an excellent teacher when it came to English. So, there we were, sitting and scratching our sweaty heads in a stuffy classroom in the sweltering heat of Thrissur. I don’t know what exactly I managed to write, but I do remember stopping after struggling through each sentence and counting to see whether I’ve crossed the mandatory 120 words. What I realize now about that exercise is that it was one of those little things which definitely improved my ability to write.

Come to think of it, I guess I struggled to write because I never used to smile much as a kid. Either I guffawed, at times I laughed, most times I sulked, but rarely did I smile. So, it must have been the unfamiliarity of it which made it difficult for me to write on it. Whether it was the lack of a fake smile during the social occasions or the presence of a genuine boredom which reflected in my face that caused more worry for my parents I do not know, but they sure did worry that I couldn’t smile. Of course, there must be a psychological mumbo-jumbo explanation for all this, but I’d like to believe that I didn’t want to or didn’t know how to fake it up. After all, I was much more innocent then.

What they say about schools being the place for your development is indeed true. It was in school that I lost the sheen of innocence. I guess it is a bit like a cricket ball losing its shine in a test match. You get hit to various parts by the willow-wielders, you get spat on by friendly bowlers who even scratch or hurt you in case they feel like you aren’t losing your shine fast enough. At the end of the day, unless and until you lose your shape horribly, you’ll last 80 overs before you get a rest, a battered and bruised product which is now ready to face the outside world. In my case, the smile got developed during my school days.

Being the dullard that I am, I realized later than most that displaying your indifference or boredom in some teachers’ class was a sure-shot recipe for disaster. They suddenly found a question to ask you for which there would be no answer or a reason to let your palm or knuckles come in contact with the wooden ruler they’d be carrying. I noticed that others who shared similar sentiments almost always escaped similar punishment, and I asked myself – “what’s he got that I ain’t got?” You see, this was before VIP Frenchie came up with that ad, so I still didn’t have an answer to that question. I saw that the only difference was that they would have a smile during the class – stretching their lips lightly with a zen-like expression in their eyes, the kind most teachers love in their students. So, I decided to give it a try myself to see whether it really does make any difference or not.

The initial attempts at smiling was not much of a success. I would stand in front of the mirror and try out a few smiles, but they always looked as if I was sitting in the loo, trying to pass stools while having constipation. I termed it as my “constipated smile.” Even to my untrained eye, that smile didn’t look effective, but I didn’t give up, and over the course of the year, I developed a fairly passable one to deflect the question, and the fireworks following that, to my neighbour. I managed to improve it vastly during my college days when I hardly ever attended the class and wasn’t sure who exactly my professors were. This made it mandatory that I have a smile ready for each and every one of them. It was only much later that I realized that more than half the guys I took to be professors were just the standard thick-mustached Mallu guys who were my fellow students.

By the time I got a job, I had developed my smile greatly. From the initial thin stretching of lips at school, I had slowly begun to show a bit of teeth at college, and my smile showed considerably more teeth at my workplace. I had read in books about a person having a cold smile or a warm smile depending on whether your eyes smiled along with your lips. That was one thing which I didn’t have to worry about much since my glasses hid my eyes from others, so it was open to their interpretation as to whether it was a warm or a cold one they received.

The pinnacle of my smiling was during my wedding. For once, the smile was there not because I wanted it to be there, but because it wanted it to be there. I was so happy that the smile just refused to leave. In fact, probably for the first time in the history of Indian marriages, a groom was asked to smile a bit less because I clearly was overdoing it. In fact, my cheeks had some difficulty getting back to their original positions after smiling through the couple of receptions and numerous visits that we had to undertake. But in all this, what mattered was that my smile was at the peak of its form.

My dental problems did cause some injury to my smile, as has been chronicled earlier in this same blog, but what mattered most is that my smile was indeed back after a brief hiatus. It sure had matured, but it sure was mine. My discovery of the smile has indeed helped me a lot in life. Many a time, I have managed to soften my sharp tongue with a big smile. Also, I’ve found that depositing a smile gives great returns because it works on compound interest. Nowadays, I try to find something to smile about with most things in life, and I do manage to. Laugh at oneself, smile at others is what I keep telling myself. I hope I managed to bring a smile to you too while you were reading this.