So you've heard 'seeing is believing'? Don't believe it anymore because nothing can be more deceptive and misleading than seeing.... Especially when the object of your sight is a smiling face. Recall the tragedy and sadness behind Charlie Chaplin's smiles and slapstick comedy, and don't let that smile fool you.

Analyse, learn to differentiate between smiles and understand that you can actually teach yourself, through various websites, to develop a genuine, factious smile that 'can make a bad date turn good, seal a business deal, and help you make friends wherever you go'. Seeing should no longer be believing.

The face has around 90 muscles in it, with about 30 of these purely for expressing emotion. It can thus be used to send many non-verbal signals, using its various features in concert. In other words, even if you're not a politician, leader or a feudalist (can you recall when you saw one of these not smiling?), you can learn to contort your 30 facial muscles to deceive by putting on a smile through such sites. These might well be the most popular sites for those aspiring to be in position of any power. And following from this, logically, there are websites which will give you techniques to be able to tell if someone is lying. These methods are frequently used by police and security experts.

Trouble is, I think, if you master this skill of spotting a lie through a smile, would that add to your life as an average citizen? So before you go there, remember, ignorance is rightly blissful for you may be hurt beyond measure when it becomes obvious to you that someone near and dear is lying.

So we come back to how our facial gestures can affect our lives. Technically, if you smile at someone, they smile back for everyone smiles in the same language. This is perhaps why, in Pakistan at least, people have stopped smiling. This is my theory, founded on the basis of my experience. We, as a people, do not smile. If you travel abroad, one of the first things that hit you is that people on the street are smiling. Not at anything in particular, just smiling. It's unnerving. In our culture, if a girl walks around with a smile, she's 'loose' and asking to be raped, if a boy smiles, he's got something up his sleeve and should be watched/avoided at all cost; men and women — well, they don't smile. Culture and experience wiped that off their face in their younger years.

Culturally, a smile gets you nowhere in Pakistan. Your subordinate or servant has truly messed up. Ideally you would like to wring his/her neck. But a civilised person that you are, you take a glass of water, a few deep breaths and confront this person, determined to get your point across in a decent and respectable manner. You fix a smile (more of a grimace in this situation) and tell them what they did wrong. You will be heard out politely with no sign of remorse. Now you're mad. You press your point to the extent you forget about your centuries of civilisation and years of education combined with good upbringing, and frown and shout. This time the message gets through. Good learners that we all are, we have learnt that smiles don't always work. Frowns and a threatening face are far more effective!

Then again, think of religious people. Though they bear the burden of carrying Allah's message of love, forgiveness and beneficence on their shoulders, they do not smile. Their faces drip with thunder and doom. And if they try and smile, it is only with the mouth. The eyes continue to look deep into your soul for human failings. Could that be, I wonder, the reason why fewer and fewer people feel that God is on their side? Frankly, when I see a stern face telling me that God is compassionate and caring, I'm confused and switch off.

Teachers are taught to smile. It makes a huge difference to their students' learning. And let me share a secret here you get more work out of your students/ subordinates with a smile (albeit a tight one) than you will with frowns and threats. But this is after they have thoroughly understood that your smile is part of your personality and it doesn't mean laxity or carelessness.

So go ahead and confuse your fellow citizens. Smile. You haven't lost it it's right there under your nose. You just forgot it was there. One size fits all!