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?