Indians are now winning hearts with their smiles

When three Indian women athletes at Rio de Janeiro scaled Mount Olympus – one tantalisingly close to getting the country’s first-ever gymnastics medal – they charmed us compatriots most with their winning smiles. In fact, having watched shuttler P.V. Sindhu fight fiercely for the gold and then heart-breakingly lose, I wondered how she would keep herself composed on the medals podium, for it was a hard-fought match and most twitter-Indians took personally the Spaniard Carolina Marin’s competitive spirit. I figured Sindhu would be sullen. When she was announced, however, she broke into a radiant smile that made the word “ecstasy” seem insufficient. It’s true, happiness shapes a face into beauty. Similarly, gymnast Dipa Karmakar, one of those rare athletes who are triumphant without a medal, was interviewed on TV and her smile shone like the rays of the sun. And wrestling medallist Sakshi Malik was voluble in her happiness and giddily smiling.

It was a pleasure to watch them and one wishes that Indians would smile more often. My apologies, but I have always associated glumness with the Indian visage. It is more noticeable abroad, perhaps because different cultures have different interpretations of a smile – or some cultures have a lot more to smile about than others. At university in the United States, fellow freshman Satish Reddy and I organised a party for the Indian students, both undergraduate and in graduate programmes, and also both IndianAmericans as well as those just off-the-boat. In the commons room where the party was held, away from the game tables and TV, several women sat, squeezed onto a long sofa – most were perhaps the wives of senior doctoral students – and all sat expressionless. “I hate that look,” Satish seethed. “I just hate the way they sit there, looking like that.”

I said nothing because I was used to it; from my childhood on, at various parties my parents dragged me to – other doctors, other Indians – the women would sit there as if awaiting public execution. Satish was right. Just looking at them was depressing, and so I never looked at them. Now I wonder if they did not smile for fear of their conservative husbands, who back home (in their bedroom) might accuse them of smiling at other men.

But even after I returned to India it was no different. My future wife and I went out on one late 1980s New Year’s Eve for general merriment in cold New Delhi, and we stopped by my grand-uncle’s place where I lived and where we had visitors from Bihar, my mother’s eldest brother and his Delhi-based sons. They all sat in front of the TV, watching one of those pre-1991 Doordarshan variety shows, their faces glum as if they were expecting a countdown not to a new year but to the end of the world. (No wonder my grand-uncle was also out partying.)

I recently came across a Polish psychologist’s paper in the June 2016 issue of the Journal of Nonverbal Behaviour, titled “Be Careful Where You Smile: Culture Shapes Judgments of Intelligence and Honesty of Smiling Individuals”. It quotes a Russian proverb, “Smiling with no reason is a sign of stupidity”, and points out that Norwegians may consider you insane if you smile at them (in Norway) for no reason at all. Even Poles feel that a stranger smiling is a sign of stupidity; and Charles Darwin mentioned “the large class of idiots who are... constantly smiling” in his “The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals”.

Smiling is of course commonly associated with positivity, in happiness or in community interaction. The paper, however, argues that in some societies smiling is seen as duplicitous – “in societies which are politically repressed, where schooling is respected and structured especially around sciences and where strong social norms are preferred”. The research showed that if you smiled you were considered less intelligent in Japan, Iran, South Korea and Russia; at the other end of the spectrum were Germany, Switzerland, Malaysia and China. Countries like Argentina, Indonesia, Zimbabwe and Iran thought you were less honest if you smiled, while the opposite held for Switzerland, Australia, Phillipines and Colombia.

Its main conclusion was that in societies where corruption was prevalent, the important evolutionary function of smiling was degraded. Corruption at a societal level meant more uncertainty, less trust, and it is in these situations that smiling can be misconstrued. Finally. This paper seemed to make sense of why throughout much of my life, Indian expressions have seemed indifferent if not outright hostile.

However, the three athletes’ infectious smiles were life-reaffirming, to say the least. It is different when over-hyped cricket stars huddle in ape-like celebration of a wicket, etc; that is more like machismo bragging. India’s Olympians brought a long-overdue realization that it is alright to smile again. Although at a societal level India still has a ways to go towards ending corruption, the fact that this generation demands growing accountability to go with its growing aspirations means that it is time for all Indians to stop fretting and start smiling. Again.

The author is a senior journalist based in New Delhi

It was a pleasure to watch Sindhu, Sakshi and Dipa, and one wishes that Indians would smile more often