Smize & syncrosmize

-Monikangkan Barooah |

Smile with your eyes –Smize, a term coined by supermodel Tyra Banks in a television show aired as ‘America’s Next Top Model’ gaining ground in this prevailing COVID age, as it rechristened the peoples mode of greetings in a new way. It illustrates beaming expressions through eyes while keeping the rest of the face neutral. Smile with your eyes that is- Smize

Service providers, specially restaurant employees typically prepares for their customers by memorising the best platter available and so does the politicians to their voters. However, In a COVID Pandemic scenario, they all have embraced an additional ritual:—making faces. They all are adopting the trick as they attempt service with a smile while the smile is out of service. The COVID mask has truly transformed as safety mask to save their face of attempted and undone promises.

A smile is formed primarily by flexing the muscles at the sides of the mouth. Some smiles include a contraction of the muscles at the corner of the eyes, an action known as a Duchenne smile. In normal times, people used to greet others by a social smile, or when the lip corners turn up but the rest of the face stays in place. Social smile greases the wheels of society and keeps people connected. Before masks, the social smile could be used to acknowledge the arrival of hotel guests, to greet restaurant diners, to greet travel customers or to achieve the consent of electoral franchise as one of the way to obtain the much desired vote. Now, they all must compensate by waving their hands, or by perfecting the smize with a protective gear on their face as protective mask, both for the virus and save their face of the electoral commitment that they have made to the people.

A smile normally expresses pleasure, sociability, happiness, joy or amusement. It is distinct from a similar but usually instinctive expression of apprehension known as a grimace. Though the studies on cultural practices shows that smiling is a means of communication throughout the world, there are differences among different cultures, religions and societies, with some using smiles to convey confusion or embarrassment.

Smile has been evolved over a period of 30 million years often portrayed as a ‘fear smirk’ by the Monkeys and apes who eventually flashed their teeth to the predators that they were harmless. The smile may have evolved differently among species and especially among humans. In animals, displaying of teeth is often used as a threat or as a sign of submission. For Chimpanzees, it can also be a sign of fear. For some the animal Barbary Macaques demonstrate the baring of teeth as a sign of playfulness, which may have similar roots and purposes as the human smile.

These days People struggled to smize on demand and had to practice a lot. A prospective electoral aspirant has expressed his inability to smize and squint really hard to make a face out. Seniors advised him to flash an extra big smile so that the cheekbones rise up against his mask which makes people laugh and as a result his eyes naturally lightened up.

In this present pandemic scenario, the protective mask really helps the political aspirants to face the electorate with a smize that which actually allows them to approach with folded hands and shrugs of promises made to them.

When one smile with or without musk and simile with your soul, the person on the receiving end will truly feel your kindness through your eyes, and they just might smize back that may resonates as the ‘Synchrosmize’.

As the assembly election is round the corner, a regional party leader and a political aspirant faced few people and sought for vote with his right hand put on his chest and with a smize. His eyes were squinted, and the science of body language and nonverbal behaviour with all the possible emotions expressed to get the things done to the best interest of the regional identity, if he wins this election.

A voter resonates his smize and clapped for the aspirants caricature and headed back to his home. The syncrosmize of the voters in terms of casting their votes while exercising their franchisee would depend a lot of the electoral aspirants smizing abilities.