Me - A Selfie

With the advent of the smart phone, selfies have become popular. They come very useful to social media addicts for changing their profile pictures almost on a daily basis. I know of a friend whose profile picture one day was a decent clean shaven face and on the next day it changed to an unshaven, grimaced and contorted face, not even recognised by his mother. Selfies have their other uses as well. You don’t have to stand any more before the mirror to decide if a pair of glasses suits you or not since you cannot store your mirror images for comparison. But with selfie facility all you have to do is to take two selfies, one with and another without glasses, store them and decide in consultation with someone if need be. Or to see if you look better with your right or left cheek to the camera. This does not necessarily make you a narcissist, deriving erotic gratification by admiring your own physical attributes.

I am however trying to use the selfie concept in a different sense. I am going to capture as it were some episodes or phases of my life in my mind’s selfie camera. Don’t confuse yourself into thinking that my narration is autobiographical.
The first episode which comes to my mind is my admission test in a Chennai School in the year of our Independence. I had been to a village school till my 4th standard and knew Basic English which in those days was taught from 1st standard. But the Chennai School’s question asking me to write any two proverbs in English foxed me as the word proverb was new to me. I had known pronouns as alternate words for proper nouns and therefore guessed that proverbs too must be the alternate words for verbs. I considered some verbs like sit, stand, run, walk, etc. and not being able to find any alternate words for them, wrote my definitive and conclusive answer “ There are no proverbs in English”. At that young age itself, I exhibited the traits of a researcher which came to my good stead later in life and career in academics.
Later while studying in higher classes in Delhi, I postulated the theory that a student would understand a theory, concept etc. more clearly not in the standard when he/she is taught, but later after going to a higher standard. For instance, the geometrical proof for the Pythagorean Theorem taught in standard 8 became clear to me only when I was in 10th standard. So also was the concept of market price and normal price in Economics, taught in school, becoming clearer after leaving school and when Economics was no longer my subject? Many others have confessed to me the validity of this theory in confidence.

Next, the selfie of my nose. Apart from showing a lot to be desired, it set me thinking in a different path. If you think that the nose is just an organ in the human face like the eyes, ears, mouth, etc., you have not understood its predominant significance. First and foremost, it juts out a few centimetre from the plane of the face. Unless you have a paunch, it is the first organ to enter a room. As an organ, it performs the same function of breathing in and breathing out and smelling in every person. So do the other organs with their assigned functions and they are more or less the same in shape and form in every person. But, like no two clocks would show the same time, no two noses look the same. What a variety of their shapes; long ,chiseled, bulbous, short, flat, stubby, up- turned showing the interiors, pinched ,twisted. In short, as many shapes as there are people on earth. Not only that, even in respect of the single nose of a person, the two nostrils are often neither symmetrical nor similar; one may me be lean and long and the other may be flared and flawed. In fact, it is the nose that characterises and classifies the races into Chinese, Greeks, Africans, Kashmiris and so on .( I would like do my second Ph.D. on nose if I get a girl research assistant with a well-shaped nose!). It is not for nothing that Blaise Pascal said “Cleopatra’s nose, had it been shorter, the face of the world would have been changed.

I conclude with a recent selfie. I am very popular in our Housing Society, among the women in particular, who all affectionately call me uncle. It led me to think that that even at my age I am a hero-like material till recently a young lady, of course with an exquisite nose, told me that my face reminded her of a lamb in her childhood home!!