The Artificial Smile

Over the Xmas/New year holidays I tried to organize our family pictures. It became noticeable or kind of self evident after looking at a few hundreds of pictures that most of the time we are all smiling to the camera but the smile in most of the pictures looked like an artificial one. A feel of the genuineness to the smile is not visible in the pictures. My wife's explanation is that it is because I am a bad photographer and I always tell every one to look at the camera and force them to smile. And that the genuineness of smile comes when the people are at their natural best and camera has to capture them unknowingly while they are happy and smiling. Forcing people to look at the camera and smile will only produce the artificial smiles. This sounded like a reasonable explanation and I almost believed it myself.

And then I came to the pictures from the years after our son is born. Now comes the amazing discovery, I find the artificial smile in all of us in the pictures i.e. me, my wife, friends, parents but not in the smile of our 2 year old son. Then I looked at the family pictures of other friends (it is amazing that you can see so many of family pictures in a few minutes on facebook), the smiles of the all the children in all those family pictures seemed very genuine, but not of the Adults. The smile of every child is pure, heartfelt, joyous and is conveying a deep emotion that is missing in the smile of all the adults. So I would say it is not an artificial smile but it is a corrupted smile.

So what causes the corruption of the smile of the Adults? Exposure to the real world? The gang rape in Delhi? Terrorists? Stock markets? Dirty politics? Greed? Jealousy? Or all of them together? The evolving and progressive civilizations only seemed to have corrupted our smile. True, we are living comfortably and luxuriously as compared to our stone aged ancestor, but what's the point in living a life which does not seem to produce genuine smiles?

New Year Resolutions

"What are your new year resolutions?" This is a common question I hear 2 weeks either side of an upcoming new year. Are we really supposed to have some resolutions or some action plan in place for each New Year? Why can't the New Year be just a celebration? Why don't you set the resolutions for other celebrations such as Xmas or Pongal or your Birthday?

I do not have any set resolutions and for me the life in 2013 goes on as it was in 2012 and in 2012 it went as in 2011 and so on. Of course there are some amazing changes as part of the daily life such as my son started walking, speaking, singing and then running J and so on. There are also other changes like arrival of new top level management of my company (again in less than 6 months?), Obama got reelected, Britain is producing a royal heir, Dravid retired and Tendular doesn’t want to even after finally scored his 100^th hundred, etc. My point is that these are part of one's daily life and like Rahul Gandhi's marital status nothing has changed on a grand scale.

Few years ago (read as 10 to 15 years ago), I have to admit that I was naïve enough to really believe that only people who have achieved some thing significant in the last one year should celebrate the arriving New Year. And all others should sleep quietly as the clock ticks past midnight (it all looks silly to me now and imagine the loss to business establishments when 99% of the world is sleeping quietly on 31^st night). I even allowed myself to be upset with people who do not believe in this crap theory. And then my dear friend Cnu( thanks mate !!) brought me to earth and to some matured thinking.  New Year is just a reason for another celebration with family and friends, it does not matter who you are or what you have achieved with your life.

Let us come back to the resolutions part. This is something that really does not make sense to me. Here is my side of the thinking. Let us say your New Year resolution is to reduce 5kg of weight by the end of the year, now:

1. It can not be that out of serendipity you realized this exactly at Dec 31 midnight. You perhaps knew that you need to reduce your weight since a few weeks or months or may be even years. 
2. So in those months/weeks/years you simply kept postponing action, even though you knew you have to do something about it. Or perhaps you waited until the Doctor told you. That’s really a bad beginning/start.
3. It's in human nature that for many of us, the action items like weight reduction, which are started with lot of vigor and zeal eventually will run out of steam. The good openings usually have bad endings. But here in this case you already have a very bad opening.

Well, the point here is if you have to do something, do it now and do not put it in some resolution list for some new year that is coming 3 months or 3 years later. And because you do it now, sadly you will not have any New Year resolution list any more. And that makes it just an occasion to celebrate with friends and family with out the added weight of resolutions, action plans, time tables etc.

And lastly, at the risk of being termed as arrogant and doing some copy right violations, I fully agree with Calvin below.