Skip to main content

Why smile?




I usually put on a smile.  It’s easy for me because the people whom I meet usually are young students who return my smile with compound interest.  Young people love smiling faces and they are sure to reciprocate with more charming smiles.  When I come across adults, I have to make an extra effort to smile but I usually succeed.

At least I’ve been assuming that I normally carry a smiling face.  That’s why I was surprised when a student of mine asked me the other day why I was so serious outside the school.  The world outside the school does not matter to me except when I have some business to do with it like buying vegetables or negotiating the traffic at some crowded junction.  I guess I don’t smile at the vegetable seller or the stranger at the traffic crossing.  I also guess that my student didn’t mean that.  Probably he noticed a drastic contrast between my face in school and the one outside.  Probably he thinks that my smile in the school is a put-on. 

I earnestly hope that my students don’t take my smile in school as a put-on.  Because it is not.  The smile is genuine.  Young students extract that smile from me and I am grateful to them for doing it.  They do make that difference to my life.

I wish the world did the same to all of us: extract smiles.  Well, the world is never so good to anyone, I think. 

When I meet people who are acquainted with me in some way I do make an effort to smile.  The effort is genuine even if the smile may not be.  I know a smile is much better than any other expression.  A smile disarms people.  Most importantly, a smile makes people think you are a happy person.  People generally leave happy creatures alone.  They are more interested in sad people because sad people carry stories within them.  People are interested in stories, sad stories, sad stories of other people.  So it’s better to smile at least to reassure the other people that you don’t have any interesting stories to narrate.  They’d rather leave you alone.

Comments

  1. Pranju chakrapaniJuly 4, 2017 at 9:38 PM

    I confess that during my earlier days in your blog I used to hesitate a lot before for making constant comments on your posts fearing the negative impact it would have on other readers.
    But how can I genuinely leave your posts without stating my love for reading such posts of yours. I have learned a lot from you. Being genuine at least in efforts may actually lead us to happiness:)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalJuly 4, 2017 at 10:01 PM

      The ruthless frankness in my writing makes readers think of me as a disgruntled if not negative person. But those who live with me in reality know a different me. In fact, I have extremely cordial relationships with my students which would be impossible if I were a negative person. I'm glad you understood me rightly.

      Delete
  2. CifarJuly 7, 2017 at 11:53 AM

    smiles are always wall breakers in any situation

    ReplyDelete
  3. UnknownJuly 21, 2017 at 10:04 PM

    After reading this post, it felt nice. Thank you sir, for writing this blog.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
48 comments
Read more

Re-exploring the Past: The Fort Kochi Chapters – 1

Inside St Francis Church, Fort Kochi Moraes Zogoiby (Moor), the narrator-protagonist of Salman Rushdie’s iconic novel The Moor’s Last Sigh , carries in his genes a richly variegated lineage. His mother, Aurora da Gama, belongs to the da Gama family of Kochi, who claim descent from none less than Vasco da Gama, the historical Portuguese Catholic explorer. Abraham Zogoiby, his father, is a Jew whose family originally belonged to Spain from where they were expelled by the Catholic Inquisition. Kochi welcomed all the Jews who arrived there in 1492 from Spain. Vasco da Gama landed on the Malabar coast of Kerala in 1498. Today’s Fort Kochi carries the history of all those arrivals and subsequent mingling of history and miscegenation of races. Kochi’s history is intertwined with that of the Portuguese, the Dutch, the British, the Arbas, the Jews, and the Chinese. No culture is a sacrosanct monolith that can remain untouched by other cultures that keep coming in from all over the world. ...
6 comments
Read more

The Lights of December

The crib of a nearby parish [a few years back] December was the happiest month of my childhood. Christmas was the ostensible reason, though I wasn’t any more religious than the boys of my neighbourhood. Christmas brought an air of festivity to our home which was otherwise as gloomy as an orthodox Catholic household could be in the late 1960s. We lived in a village whose nights were lit up only by kerosene lamps, until electricity arrived in 1972 or so. Darkness suffused the agrarian landscapes for most part of the nights. Frogs would croak in the sprawling paddy fields and crickets would chirp rather eerily in the bushes outside the bedroom which was shared by us four brothers. Owls whistled occasionally, and screeched more frequently, in the darkness that spread endlessly. December lit up the darkness, though infinitesimally, with a star or two outside homes. December was the light of my childhood. Christmas was the happiest festival of the period. As soon as school closed for the...
14 comments
Read more

Re-exploring the Past: The Fort Kochi Chapters – 2

Fort Kochi’s water metro service welcomes you in many languages. Surprisingly, Sanskrit is one of the first. The above photo I took shows only just a few of the many languages which are there on a series of boards. Kochi welcomes everyone. It welcomed the Arabs long before Prophet Muhammad received his divine inspiration and gave the people a single God in the place of the many they worshipped. Those Arabs made their journey to Kerala for trade. There are plenty of Muslims now in Fort Kochi. Trade brought the Chinese too later in the 14 th -15 th centuries. The Chinese fishing nets that welcome you gloriously to Fort Kochi are the lingering signs of the island’s Chinese links. The reason that brought the Portuguese another century later was no different. Then came the Dutch followed by the British. All for trade. It is interesting that when the northern parts of India were overrun by marauders, Kerala was embracing ‘globalisation’ through trades with many countries. Babu...
10 comments
Read more

Schrödinger’s Cat and Carl Sagan’s God

Image by Gemini AI “Suppose a patriotic Indian claims, with the intention of proving the superiority of India, that water boils at 71 degrees Celsius in India, and the listener is a scientist. What will happen?” Grandpa was having his occasional discussion with his Gen Z grandson who was waiting for his admission to IIT Madras, his dream destination. “Scientist, you say?” Gen Z asked. “Hmm.” “Then no quarrel, no fight. There’d be a decent discussion.” Grandpa smiled. If someone makes some similar religious claim, there could be riots. The irony is that religions are meant to bring love among humans but they end up creating rift and fight. Scientists, on the other hand, keep questioning and disproving each other, and they appreciate each other for that. “The scientist might say,” Gen Z continued, “that the claim could be absolutely right on the Kanchenjunga Peak.” Grandpa had expected that answer. He was familiar with this Gen Z’s brain which wasn’t degenerated by Instag...
11 comments
Read more