TO FLASH, OR NOT TO..

Mona Lisa definitely wasn’t smiling when she was being painted. Or else, Da Vinci would have been too charmed to deface her by not lining the eyebrows.
The power of the 32 calcium stones adorning your jaws is, to be brutally honest, overrated. Personality-enhancers, from Dale Carnegie to Colgate, swear by them. There are civil laws in some countries that ban the public display of skin above the wrists, but none that forbid the flashing of those pearly whites (or flossy chromes, depending on oral hygiene). Someone called Frank Ryan once joined a call centre and found his operator name altered to Frank Berry within an hour of reporting for work. The reason – All names in that office had to end in a –y or –ty syllable because it made sure that whenever you said your name, you ended up smiling. Or, at least flashing.
Plastic smiles ought to be the greatest threat to existence after the H1N1. Waitresses have them while they are fussing over the coffee you spilled on the upholstery; employers have them while dishing the pink slip (but distinctly not, while signing your pay cheques); Kingfisher stewards will have them even as a drunk passenger abuses him/her; even mannequins have them alongside the inordinately-priced tags of the clothes they adorn. Somewhere inside the deepest of our intestines is the belief in a smile as the greatest disarming technique after freestyle karate. Next time you hear an engaging speaker, observe how he lures you with laughter. Remember the joke you cracked at the luncheon last month to get yourself out of a spot? Irrespective of its banality, humour works. Simply because it puts 300-odd of your muscles at ease. The moment our neurons sniff a smile, they know they are on familiar ground.
Beware of a smile. It intoxicates your rational senses. Especially if it comes from a 24-year-old female intern (even the not-so-great Bill Clinton couldn’t resist that). The threat is particularly enhanced in those consumerism-plagued times where markets will go to any extent to suck out your wallets. Comedians, with the exception of Mike Myers, may be past their sell-by dates but the parody that is civilization lingers on, with all its perils and contradictions. Remarkably, we manage to keep ourselves mentally solvent as recessions surge, leaders cheat, earthquakes recur and 15-year-olds sleep around. Should we be still laughing at the shallowness of it all?

Maybe yes, as long as they do not insist on your molars being sparkling white.