Skip to main content

Smile

Photo by Joshi Daniel
I love smiles. They make a huge difference to the way people perceive and communicate. A smile can melt the snow that envelopes the indifferent heart. It can douse fires and sprout blooms. I consider myself particularly fortunate because my days begin with a thousand smiles. The way from the parking space to the staffroom of my school is strewn with angelic smiles.

   One of the unwritten rules in my class is that everyone should keep a smiling face. Smiles make the classroom almost paradisiacal. Both teaching and learning become fun with all those smiles lighting up the air.

   Once a student decided to exhibit her displeasure with me by presenting me the most stoic indifference possible because I had given her less marks in a test than she thought she deserved. My explanation that her answer did not match her potential did not convince her. I waited for her natural beatific smile to return to her naughty cheeks below her dancing eyes. But her resolve to punish me surpassed my persuasions until I confronted her with a personal colloquy which eventually led to the beginning of an unforgettable relationship. One of the most enchanting young personalities I ever came across unfolded itself because of my love of smiles.

   I admit that outside the school campus I don’t smile as much as I would love to. The adult world is too funny a place to extract smiles from me. There are too many people out there who insist on choosing what I should believe in, write about, and even eat!  I have chosen to stay away from that world as far as possible. I have embraced solitude gladly outside the classroom. There is a plenitude of smiles in that solitary world, left by unforgettable people as indelible imprints in the deepest chambers of my heart.  

PS. Written for In[di]spire Edition 225: #Smile

Comments

  1. Rewritten with a reward to past smiles. :)

    ReplyDelete
  2. My husband and I went to the petrol pump there was a huge que, suddenly we were ushered ahead of the disarrayed vehicle and we got we could get out of the place fast. My husband asked thanked the boy and was about to tip him, the boy told my husband,"Madam is the only one who smiles when she comes to fill petrol and asks me about my day."

    ReplyDelete
  3. Very well-written.
    Loved your post:)

    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

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...

India in Modi-Trap

That’s like harnessing a telescope to a Vedic chant and expecting the stars to spin closer. Illustration by Gemini AI A friend forwarded a WhatsApp message written by K Sahadevan, Malayalam writer and social activist. The central theme is a concern for science education and research in India. The writer bemoans the fact that in India science is in a prison conjured up by Narendra Modi. The message shocked me. I hadn’t been aware of many things mentioned therein. Modi is making use of Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan’s Centre for Study and Research in Indology for his nefarious purposes projected as efforts to “preserve and promote classical Indian knowledge systems [IKS]” which include Sanskrit, Ayurveda, Jyotisha (astrology), literature, philosophy, and ancient sciences and technology. The objective is to integrate science with spirituality and cultural values. That’s like harnessing a telescope to a Vedic chant and expecting the stars to spin closer. The IKS curricula have made umpteen r...

Two Women and Their Frustrations

Illustration by Gemini AI Nora and Millie are two unforgettable women in literature. Both are frustrated with their married life, though Nora’s frustration is a late experience. How they deal with their personal situations is worth a deep study. One redeems herself while the other destroys herself as well as her husband. Nora is the protagonist of Henrik Ibsen’s play, A Doll’s House , and Millie is her counterpart in Terence Rattigan’s play, The Browning Version . [The links take you to the respective text.] Personal frustration leads one to growth into an enlightened selfhood while it embitters the other. Nora’s story is emancipatory and Millie’s is destructive. Nora questions patriarchal oppression and liberates herself from it with equanimity, while Millie is trapped in a meaningless relationship. Since I have summarised these plays in earlier posts, now I’m moving on to a discussion on the enlightening contrasts between these two characters. If you’re interested in the plot ...

Hindutva’s Contradictions

The book I’m reading now is Whose Rama? [in Malayalam] by Sanskrit scholar and professor T S Syamkumar. I had mentioned this book in an earlier post . The basic premise of the book, as I understand from the initial pages, is that Hindutva is a Brahminical ideology that keeps the lower caste people outside its terrain. Non-Aryans are portrayed as monsters in ancient Hindu literature. The Shudras, the lowest caste, and the casteless others, are not even granted the status of humans.  Whose Rama? The August issue of The Caravan carries an article related to the inhuman treatment that the Brahmins of Etawah in Uttar Pradesh meted out to a Yadav “preacher” in the last week of June 2025. “Yadavs are traditionally ranked as a Shudra community,” says the article. They are not supposed to recite the holy texts. Mukut Mani Singh Yadav was reciting verses from the Bhagavad Gita. That was his crime. The Brahmins of the locality got the man’s head tonsured, forced him to rub his nose at t...