People smile.

At every corner!

Probably you both once had coffee together or shouted cheers for your team together or just randomly shook your hands during some conference. Still, people smile at you!

Smiles are deceiving. You don’t know whether they are acknowledging smile or betraying smile or just I-know-what-you-did-smile.

After all, people try to interpret smile as per their mood.

Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa was right in front of me, smiling. I don’t know how she was feeling when her portrait was made. People have their own theories explaining her emotions. I don’t know what I saw in her eyes. After all it was hard to tell where she was looking at. It felt like she was following me everywhere in the room, between that jostling and pushing she didn’t leave her eyes off  me. As millions before me, I tried to smile her back or say grinned at her and tried to understand how she was feeling. With folding hands put on her stomach, what emotion she was going through.

I wonder, was she thinking about her child in her womb, people say she was pregnant at that time. Or was she laughing at Da Vinci himself thinking what an ugly bloke is painting my picture. Or she feeling sad thinking someday no one will ask me to paint again as I turn ugly hag. Or she is merely smiling back to people like us who are grinning at her.

I don’t know.

As I looked into her eyes, I felt her pain…. I felt her inner happiness. Was I trying to put my own emotions into her smile? Even if so, why did I see pain in her eyes? Was I too in pain, probably I was: in pain of being far far away. Then if I was in pain, how could I see her inner happiness? Or was I too content to be in city of love? Or was I just being another philosopher?

I tried hard to gauge her emotions but failed miserably; was she happy or sad? Or is it just an illusion? And Mona Lisa herself won’t explain. All she does is, smile at everyone.

Why is smile so enigmatic? Is every smile like that or is it just her smile? I know, I won’t buy any answers but still I can’t stop asking same question, again and again!

P.S. Look at the second picture! Apparently he is crying. But is he unhappy? Look again!

P.S. 2: Monalisa picture source: Flickr/Joaquín_Martínez_Rosado

“…….Life’s like a road that you travel on
When there’s one day here and the next day gone
Sometimes you bend and sometimes you stand
Sometimes you turn your back to the wind
There’s a world outside every darkened door …..”

How true these words are. Life is like a highway where you meet many different people, share company or we might share more than just company, but eventually when turnings come, we part our ways.  And new road ahead and new companions, new relationships, new people.

One of my friend once defined life as a traffic. We meet while waiting for train or bus, we come close, become intimate and when bus or train comes, we bid farewell: sometimes to meet again in new station and sometimes for forever.

May be this way life’s trying to teach us: whatever that has beginning, has an end. And end is a new beginning. The cycle continues.