Facelook

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One summer night in 1998, after gorging on my wife's "whole class dinner on demand" for a unique "repeat telecast", the Class of 98 gifted me the book, Inscrutable Americans, by one Anurag Mathur. I found the book readable and interesting.

I haven't met many Americans face to face for any length of time, so I don't know how inscrutable they really are, but I can state emphatically that we Indians are eminently scrutable. We don't and can't hide our emotions easily and we are warmblooded creatures in human relations. Mark Twain said that Indians have about the most expressive faces and that their satin skins suit it admirably. He even found the Indian Crow full of rowdy human feelings and celebrated it in one of the best prose pieces I ever read:

http://gpsastry.blogspot.in/2008_06_01_archive.html

I haven't been much of a mixer but I always loved watching faces and the rich texture of emotions they displayed from time to time. Indian faces can be divided into three broad groups:

1. Liquid Faces
2. Liquid Crystal Faces
3. Solid Faces

Liquid faces are so called since liquids can't help taking the shapes of the vessels they are poured into. So also these faces immediately display the passing emotions and can't hide them. A smooth and fair complexion helps.

Liquid Crystal Faces are synthetic put-up jobs. All actors have to practice this art of showing well the emotions their characters are going through. It is their profession and living. But there are some amateurs in the real world who have this gift. They become great storytellers. But watch out!

Solid faces can also be called "Constipated Faces". They show only one emotion on their faces and that is 'bored vexation'. It is rather nice to interact with them...anything solid is a challenge to crack.

In my experience, my Guru SDM had the most liquid face. He had a great complexion and could never hide the gamut of his running feelings. After the first two 'probation' years I was working with him, he shed all his armor when talking to me, and talk he did, hours on end...mostly his reminiscences. From his absurd assertion that Dirac became senile at 40 (which he did with firm conviction) to his sly imputation: "You are a favorite of HNB, I know", when he was making disparaging comments about HNB, it was a great pleasure to watch his smoothly flowing face.

Synthetic faces I saw several, mostly colleagues with axes to grind, trying to milk the current HoD (to mix metaphors). Whenever they entered my room, it was a great game for me to guess the shape of the blade they were carrying in their pocket...I obliged most of the time, because grinding them was mostly inconsequential to me...if you think I am boasting, here is the excerpt from my ex-HoD (MLM) writing a decade after we parted: "...Perhaps you don't know that I happen to be one of your admirers because of your calibre (sic) , simplicity, aloofness and helpful attitude towards all..."

I saw one constipated face that I can never forget. During my two RS years at AU (which were stopgaps for me before I found a 'permanent' job) I was working in a Research Lab where this Senior Research Fellow was going about the whole day with such a serious and stern look on his face as if the whole world is at peril and his skill in soldering is the panacea for it. Rumor had it that he got a Third Class somewhere upstream and got into the Lab through one of those back-doors. And to top it all, he was needlessly defensive of this handicap that his voice never broke and whenever he tried to talk, he was mistaken for a lady. I am told this defect is nowadays corrected by one deft pull of the vocal cords by a capable surgeon...much easier than in the award-winning Smile Pinky.

It is a great pleasure to watch faces that instantly go through conflicting emotions. I give two examples:

1. Towards the end of my stay at IIT KGP, I used to work in my office late nights chatting with Edwin at Boston and so arrive at the Phy Office to collect my snail-mails if any at 1PM when the Office was manned only by Sahababu and the corridors were deserted. All mails then were dumped into an open tray and everyone could see what everyone else is getting and guess (Decades earlier to that, Prof VR met me one day in the Phy Office checking mails and when I remarked that I never found any mail for him, he smiled and said, "I give my home address in all my official correspondence but come here only to see who is getting what")

But that afternoon I saw my ex-student TBG and three other senior colleagues standing and chatting desultorily reclining on the balcony rails outside the Office. And as I went in and picked up a fabulous parchment envelope with the Three-Lion emblem embossed on its top, Sahababu said: "Sir, misti khavaben! (Sir, feed us sweets!)." A look at the from-address showed that it was from His Excellency the Governor of West Bengal. I was not really nonplussed since the way things were turning out between me and a certain WB University, of which he was the (non-playing) Chancellor, I felt things were fishy. I tore open the envelope and after browsing, I passed it on to Sahababu saying, "It is a right-royal rebuke from your Gov." He was taken aback. And as I was exiting, TBG (my ex-student-turned Professor) made bold and said they were all standing by and waiting for sweets. I passed on the letter to them and as I started watching their faces, it was such a great pleasure that I can never forget...it reminded me of my College Chemistry Lab when the color of the litmus solution suddenly turns from red to blue as the liquid from the burette slowly descends.

(Governor got it back from me as good as he tried to dish it out..his Secretary forgot the elementary lesson that he should hear both sides of the story before passing strictures...rest was silence)

2. Dr PGD was a Ph D in Geology from Canada and was staying in our Faculty Hostel for a couple of years as a CSIR Pool Officer (the Pool must have dried up by now). And we were friends since he was very well-read and nice to talk to. He was desperately looking for a job in India, wading trough all the ads that used to appear in The Statesman and Amrit Bazar Patrika.

During the Lunch Hour that day, the newspapers arrived late (they had to limp from Cal on rails) and I found that PGD had just left the Dining Hall. And browsing through them I saw an ad from the Govt of WB asking for immediate applications for a lucrative post that suited PGD's qualifications to a tee. I knew that the newspapers had a lifetime of a few hours in our Dining Hall and so cut the ad out and slipped it into my pocket. And was debating if I should knock on his bolted door since I knew by the roomy silence that he must have just dropped into his favorite siesta. But made bold and knocked anyway.

PGD shouted: "Ke?" like a lion roaring when disturbed at his kill. And came out with such an annoyed and angry look on his face that I was scared. As I passed the ad on to him and he started reading it, the color of his face changed from one end of VIGBYOR to the other.

He got the job and retired with a sumptuous pension like me and we happened to meet only once after his marriage...a few weeks before I left KGP...he came down to admit his son into IIT KGP...the young chap missed out on my Jumbo Lectures...relief on both sides.

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