The Smile that Wins

There is an excellent short story by P.G. Wodehouse titled "The Smile that Wins" on the physiology of the smile. The day after the polling in the 2001 Assembly elections in Kerala, I had written a report in The Hindu inspired by the Wodehouse story. I searched it out when reminded of it during a conversation with a friend yesterday. This is the link:
http://www.hinduonnet.com/2001/05/13/stories/1513211o.htm
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And this is the text:

Smiling their way to victory
By P. Venugopal

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM, MAY 12. In a keenly contested election, what a candidate fears most in his or her opponent is the ability to sport a superior smile.

Strategies can always be countered with counter-strategies, manipulations with counter-manipulations. The candidate can confidently leave this aspect of the electoral contest to the wily campaign managers.

However, when it comes to the smile, outside agencies cannot be of much assistance. The candidates have to handle it themselves, each according to his or her skill and upbringing. The catch here is that some people are natural `smilers', while some others just do not look their best with a smile on.

Now that the polling process is over, there is no harm in narrating the predicament of the LDF candidate in Alappuzha constituency, Mr. A. M. Abdul Rahim, while attempting to compete with his UDF rival, Mr. K. C. Venugopal, in the matter of wooing the voters with a smiling face.

The first batch of election posters of the LDF had Mr. Rahim looking down from the walls with a wistful expression on his face. A keen observer could have even noticed the traces of a smile on his lips.

In the LDF circles, however, there was a widespread feeling that this was was not enough. The feedback was that it was far short of what the situation demanded, because, the rival candidate, Mr. Venugopal, was virtually beaming like a rainbow from his posters.

To prevent Mr. Venugopal carrying this edge to the polling booth, Mr. Rahim had a second batch of posters printed midway into the campaign. These posters bring out his supreme effort before the camera. The smile he could extract out his unyielding facial muscles was, at best, the grimace of a dyspeptic wincing from a sudden pang in the stomach.

According to the story doing the rounds in Alappuzha, Mr. Venugopal was so ecstatic about these posters that he even offered to foot the entire printing cost.

Mrs. Mercy Ravi, the UDF candidate in Kottayam, also came across a similar predicament during the campaign. In her case, the problem did not pertain to her ability to smile. But her smile, in the first batch of UDF posters, had a supercilious sniffing expression about it.

Her husband, Mr. Vayalar Ravi, who had been managing her campaign, was quick to notice the danger and had a second batch of posters printed. In these posters, she comes out with her lips parted slightly, the expression being that of a woman who is not only supercilious, but also amused at what is happening around her.

Some politicians like Mr. K. Karunakaran and Mr. Vakkom Purushothaman are virtually born with radiant smiles on their faces. The famous picture of Mr. Vakkom, smiling from ear to ear while immersing an urn containing the ashes of the late V. K. Krishna Menon in the tri-sea at Kanyakumari several years ago, must be still fresh in the memory of all newspaper readers in the State.

In political circles, Mr. Vakkom's smile, by itself, is considered worth at least 5,000 votes in any election. It must have been the cause of many a nightmare for the LDF candidate, Mr. Kadakampally Surendran, who took on Mr. Vakkom in Kazhakkuttom constituency this time.

Mr. A. K. Antony's smile is a twitch at the left corner of the mouth and it makes him appear as though he is flinching at some damaging remark about him by Mr. Karunakaran. The Speaker, Mr. M. Vijayakumar, reminds you of the Cheshire Cat in Alice's Wonderland. His smile lingers in the air long after he had flashed it at a campaign meeting and vanished.

Mr. V. S. Achuthanandan prefers to retain the unsmiling expressing of a true revolutionary, but in exceptional cases he is willing to concede a smile, though grudgingly.

The man you can never trick into a smile is the CMP leader, Mr. M. V. Raghavan. Even in his election posters, he carries the expression of a television news reader announcing the latest toll of a hooch tragedy.

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