THE FABRICATION OF TEARS!

This blog was originally posted on my other blog page - http://r-sharma.sulekha.com/blog/posts.htm

 

THE FABRICATION OF TEARS!

Feb 18 2009

Sobbing on cue is a highly refined art.
In my previous blog “READY..SET..CRY - TEARS OF SORROW”, we discussed the sympathy invoking quality of bona fide tears. Some expert lamenters may not always appear to have a sensible justification for their unpredictable wailing, but closer examination reveals profound premeditation behind every factitious teardrop. In the same context, I also explained how some perfectly healthy and mentally stable humans could not produce tears, unless they witnessed a cogent tragedy unfolding in front of them! You may belong to this group of parched & desiccated humans who might be missing all the advantages that come with shedding tears at will! Weeping is a breeze if only you learn the techniques along with the benefits of tear production. Tricking people with tears is so easy, only a fool would not even try to cry!

Fabricated tears must have an agenda. To wipe or not to wipe is the next question!
The answer depends on how perceptive you are and how badly you want to accomplish your goals! In my opinion, contrived tears must be left untouched until the final goal has been reached!

In this blog, I will try to discuss various ways of producing eye drops, (or at least pretending to sob) and advertising them for maximum publicity. Tear-à-tickle Analysis is a valid subject that I hope will be taught in colleges one day. Until then, we are on our own. Let us start with the assumption that you are an emotionless person who can only manage to produce a few droplets under duress.

Let us put those frugal tears to prudent use!

* Say you are a contestant in one of those universally televised beauty pageants, and you have just been crowned the winner! If you are a male contestant, no one pays any attention to you anyway. Whether your contest is televised or not, you can do the following — Inflate your chest muscles and grin shamelessly as they place the crown and sash on your imposing frame. Take a cougar’s swagger down the victory ramp, and you are done!

However, if you are a female beauty contestant who has just been declared the winner, there is an age-old, time-honored set of customary rules to follow during the actual crowning ceremony. First, you should appear to be thoroughly surprised, even if you had already sensed that your runner-up just lost the first place by giving the most immature answer to one of those highly intelligent questions by the judges such as, “if you were on Venus, how would you improve the lives of female aliens living there?” Your runner-up may have blurted out an asinine answer such as, “There are no aliens on Venus!” Just contain your excitement and pretend not to have sensed your own victory. As soon as they announce your name as the winner, open your eyes and mouth wide (without revealing your dental fillings). While the other girls are working feverishly to fix that silly crown on your head, lift your palms up to cover your face and eyes! There is a reason for it! Behind your hands, try to generate some teardrops as fast as you can. Any amount helps! I understand that you are extremely thrilled and would actually like to let out a loud guffaw and thump your fist on your chest to mock those losers next to you. But you would be considered an inconsiderate cackling witch if you ever did that! Contort your pretty face until it gets sufficiently grotesque. Unless you produce the minimal amount of tears required to smudge your black mascara all over your face, chances are that you may have broken that customary “weep after you sweep the crown” routine!

* Say you are an ill-tempered bully in your family who does not know how to get along with your “loved” ones. Say your beloved Aunt Sally is departing back to her hometown after an extensive stay in your home, during which time you made several insensitive and jealous comments to hurt her feelings deliberately. The final day has arrived, and it is time for you to drop her off at the airport. Suddenly your conscience starts to jab at your heart! You realize that your ‘beloved Aunty’ will be gone for good! Do not lose hope! I am sure you can muster a teardrop or two at the nick of time inside the airport lounge! If you cannot generate enough tears to cause a stream, simply turn your face to a light source and allow the drops stuck on your eye-line to glisten. Make sure not to blink until Aunt Sally gets a good look at your treasured droplets. Keep staring at her like a stunned animal and follow her every move with your wet eyeballs. Hopefully Aunty realizes your sudden change of heart and gives you a sympathetic pat, or even better, a hug! If she ignores your precious tears, then you are in deep trouble! A little bit of introspection may help relieve your pain.

* Say you are a priest who has just broken the trust of your congregation. Let us also add child molestation and financial misappropriations to the list of charges. Your day of atonement in front of your devoted congregation has arrived! You do not have an ounce of shame or embarrassment about what you have done. So you do not know where to begin, or how to extricate yourself from the quandary. Now you have been forced to appear in front of the crowd eagerly waiting for retribution and bloodshed!

Shed some tears instead! The miraculous effects of tears on even the most aggressive of mobs will amaze you! If your outrageous sins fail to induce those tears of guilt, then at least dwell on your current pathetic predicament! You have been caught! Your sorry plight is sure to bring out tears of self-pity, if not due to repentance or remorse! Face the crowd of devotees and parishioners boldly and raise your face upwards, as if glancing towards God himself. The idea is to let those high-wattage ceiling lights to reflect off the tears pouring down your face. Reporters with TV cameras will be taking close-ups of your face.

Mutter some emotionally charged words like, “Oh Lord, forgive thy son! I have sinned! I have betrayed all those who have trusted me. I do not want to whitewash my sin…...yeah, wash may be….with tears…, but I am as honest as I have always been!”

For years, you have trained that crowd of parishioners to forgive and forget everyone’s transgressions! Reconciliation flows through their blood, just as insincerity flows through your tears. They will exonerate you in no time. You may even be reinstated to your lofty pedestal of priesthood! Holy moly!

* Same trick is applicable if you are a politician who has just been entrapped in a corruption scandal, only to be outdone by your own infidelity scandal! To make matters worse, you have cheated on your devoted spouse of 32 years! You are now forced by your own political party of hypocrites to make a speech of contrition. Try an idea that has been tested and proven by scores of your debauched predecessors. Politicians swear by the effectiveness of the following shenanigan—

Call for an impromptu press conference. Convince your wife, however shocked and embarrassed she may be, to accompany you to that podium in front of hundreds of cameras from the international press. Force her to stand very close to you, holding your icky hands. Tilt your head slightly towards her….body language should always display compatibility. Look into her sad eyes, if possible, and then declare to the whole world, that you have “nobody to blame, but yourself”! (Duh!) In your case, tears may be very hard to manufacture, which is understandable considering that only soulless individuals become successful politicians. Simply continue to peer into her eyes and pout your lower lips ever so slightly. The glaring lights will exaggerate your minutest expression. Declare that you and your family have already done some deep soul-searching (even though the FBI only busted you 8 hours ago!). Plead with the nosey reporters to respect your family’s privacy, even though you only care about yourself. Hope and pray that your wife maintains eye contact with you without conveying her wrath or fury! What she does with you back home is your problem!

* Lastly, say you are a famous TV anchor on NBC’s morning show. During the Eight O’clock hour, strangely you shed some somber emotive tears upon reading a (distinctly hilarious) letter from the Bush daughters to the Obama daughters. Now your producer again wants you to repeat the sobbing during the Nine and Ten O’clock hours as well! Silly if you ask me, but you never know what appeals to millions of TV viewers out there! All you have to do is keep a tissue ready during the commercial break. As soon as the camera turns on, just pretend to dab below your eyes. That should be enough to fool the masses into thinking what a caring personality you are! Never miss a chance for self-promotion.

I could go on, but I better stop now. It has been a pleasure making you cry, but I hate watching you cry!

Would you please visit my previous blog “READY..SET..CRY - TEARS OF SORROW”? If you choose to ignore, you may actually drive me to tears! Is that what you really want?

Copyright © 2009 Ranjini Sharma All Rights Reserved

READY..SET..CRY - TEARS OF SORROW!

This blog was originally posted on my other blog page - http://r-sharma.sulekha.com/blog/posts.htm

 

READY..SET..CRY - TEARS OF SORROW!

Feb 12 2009

Tears come in many configurations—tears of joy, sorrow and the unexplained!
Trying to decipher them involves a deep understanding of human psychology. I do not claim expertise in this area, particularly because I am one of those dim-witted humans who cannot fully comprehend the purpose behind some of the highly erratic sobbing and strangely mistimed sniveling! Through a series of essays, I will attempt to understand this commonly used fluid expression of emotions.

Tears of deep sorrow always evoke sympathy. However empathizing with the tearful person requires you to produce some tangible tears of your own. This is easier said than done! Some people can also cry under stress, although I personally prefer being stone-faced and stoic while trying to rack my brains for ideas to extricate myself out of the stressful situation. The act of crying in its flawless form has a certain predictable methodology to it. Although the reason behind the floods may not always be the same, we are all familiar with the results. First, saline droplets form streamlined floods which gush down from the corners of both the eyes…although I have seen some people shed tears through only one eye, if the other is afflicted with a strange drying spell. The briny floods then slide down the cheeks past the crevices near the nose, dripping over (sometimes right through) the lips, then wetting the chin and spilling on anything in their path to create a puddle that gets wiped up immediately.

Purposeful tears can be justified based on the sad predicament of the individual prior to the actual secretion’s commencement. If grief procedures are correctly followed, the proper way to cry requires the gloomy individual to be emotionally affected in such a way that the brain first instructs the facial muscles to contort. Other humans (or animals) in the vicinity should be able to sense the sudden change in the contours of the crier’s face. Spontaneous tears follow, sometimes in torrents, sometimes in dismal trickles. In most cases, the person may cover the rather distorted face with one hand while trying desperately to search for a tissue or a handkerchief with the other. After dabbing those tears by completing the osmosis, the person looks around with an embarrassing smile as if surprised by that intense outburst. Blowing the nose with gusto concludes that episode, unless the situation worsens, in which case the entire process is repeated all over again, until the lachrymal glands refuse to cooperate with the inconsolable individual. At that moment, the torrents may cease inexplicably along with the sorrow itself!

Death can bring the worst of tears! One needs to have a certain connection with the dear departed soul in order to experience the full intensity of the gut-wrenching despondency. I remember my first experience with death. I was barely ten years old and was witnessing the tragic setting for the first time. It was an elderly family member in her late nineties. She had lived a fulfilling life surrounded by her large extended family of children, countless grandchildren, and friends. She died very peacefully in the midst of the same overpopulated assembly of loved ones. I had sensed that there was a certain protocol to follow. One by one, the kith and kin arrived. They immediately rushed over to the deceased elder and held her hands, after which they could be seen doubling over in sheer agony with plenty of tears wetting the very hands that were deathly cold! Some moistened the feet too. There was a line of mourners as they took turns. I was somewhere down the line watching and wondering how to react during my turn. The men bowed with respect, but amazingly many of them did not shed one drop! All of the female mourners on the other hand wept without fail, whether the rest of the ceremonial protocols were followed or not. I realized then that crying was absolutely essential and I was expected to copy the women. Try as hard as I may, I just could not squeeze out one measly teardrop! I was a thin dehydrated little girl those days, and tears are mostly made of H2O. I had known the expired elder quite well. She was a sweet soul who was highly respected within my family too. I remember her being generous to me whenever I visited her home. But none of her actions were evil or heartrending enough to make me want to cry. I had happy memories of her, and yet people were wailing louder and louder as my turn neared!

Not wanting to appear heartless, I decided to work on my emotions by thinking about sad things. I had to come up with something so convincingly sad that my brain could be fooled to command the initiation of tears at that exact moment when I too was expected to kneel down by the body and pick up one of those very soggy hands. There were only ten people ahead of me….I had to be quick! School was a good place to start. How about Physics, Chemistry and Biology? These terms had been newly introduced to my fifth grade central school class…..and I had no clue what they were! Forget the subjects; I did not even know what they meant! Ugh, the hassle of sitting through those classes was sad, really! Standing in the line of mourners, I was happy that I had finally found something to induce those tears! BUT it was simply NOT working! The reality was that I had discovered a way to ignore the teacher’s babbling to seek quiet solitude in those classes by doodling! Hence, I was not moved one bit! In fact, my thoughts actually resulted in a discernable nasty smile! I quickly turned my face away hoping no one spotted that inconsiderate hardened snicker!

Well, it was a do or die situation, and I was not the one dead! So I decided to contort my face. I had seen plenty of crybabies, and I knew exactly how their faces looked. I tried pouting the lower lip outwards….it is the first signal that a baby is about to cry! I scrunched my eyebrows down while trying to squeeze my cheeks by pumping air into them. Then I tried to compress my eyeballs to see if I could extract any liquid. Nope…nothing in there….not even one crocodile tear…although I am told that reptiles do not cry. Time was running out! I was now three criers away and was wedged behind two strange ladies. My parents had finished paying homage and were back in the crowd of onlookers…..and those onlookers were really studying every single mourner’s reaction intently! I wondered if the others standing in line behind me were already in tears, but no! Strangely, the whole business of crying had a mechanical symphonic orchestration to it! One minute they were in line somber-faced talking about the horrible city traffic, the next minute they were bending down crying!

I had to solve the problem smartly. Instead of going alone, I decided to latch on to the two ladies and use them as a cover from all those gawkers. As the threesome approached the body, the two women suddenly descended down into a heap, kneeling and prostrating on the floor! I felt utterly exposed! I then decided to descend myself and hide my drought stricken face behind the women’s hinds, which wasn’t too hard since they both were humongous in size! How I managed to wriggle out of that uncomfortable situation, I do not know. It was the day I learned that tears of sorrow needed one essential component—Sorrow!

Not all situations are depressing enough to make one miserable. Some people can cry all of the time, but not all people can cry at any appointed time!

Timing those precious tears is everything!

My next essay is going to understand those mistimed tears. Who knows if they are really genuine!!

Copyright © 2009 Ranjini Sharma All Rights Reserved