Inheritance of Looks

The regular reflex of a rational man on receiving the news of a new born is to congratulate. But even before he is done with it, he pops up the question which creates an identity crisis. Literally. "Whom does the baby resemble?" To me, infancy is the closest that anything can get to Communism. Like puppies and Iphones, I find all the babies same. They may vary in size and shade, but they all look alike to me. It also my firm belief that they appear same to everyone. How else would you explain couples with infants changing their whatsapp DP on a daily basis. The picture is always that of the baby. Just the color of the baby's shirt changes. The only motive behind this mundane ritual is to help the parents identify their baby in case he chooses to join a melee of his friends in a mall or at a park. This anecdotal evidence saves me from being embarrassed about my personal disability.

Amongst my innumerable cerebral handicaps is my inability to identify people. The best I can get to is to categorize the faces as "familiar" and "unfamiliar". While people solve crosswords or Sodukus for intellectual stimulus, my favorite pastime is to recollect the name of the person who greeted me in the lift as I entered the office. Such puzzles often keep me engaged for days. Even a smartphone without a camera will do a better job at facial recognition than me. With such acute problem, it is too onerous a task to trace the ancestry of a baby's facial features.

It is also not always the case that a child would exactly resemble the parents. As a kid, I vividly recollect my parents telling nosy guests that I resemble my paternal grandmother while my brother got his looks from our maternal grandfather. The guests never met either of my grandparents and the conversation soon moved to other equally pointless subjects like politics and neighbours. While both of us do have certain features of our respective progenitors, I still doubt if the answer was entirely true. We would, probably, know only when we grow as old as them. However, an astute analysis of the answer reveals that it maintains the delicate balance of between patriarchy and matriarchy. An apocryphal theory is that the incessant wars between my parents on my resemblance came to an end with the arrival of my brother and the subsequent equitable settlement on the claims over the genetic propagation of their respective families. 

In my case, however, there is no such fight for supremacy. I am more than willing to let my better half take the credit for my newborn's looks for I know the horrors that lurk in the future if he takes after me. The ordeal of living with a visage that neither inspires confidence nor invokes sympathy would be the running theme of my autobiography, if I ever write one. But such self-effacing doesn't come to my rescue because people want an answer.

It took me a few falters before I discovered a bureaucratic way out of the conundrum. Pass the buck. So now, when people ask me about the looks of my son, my cheeky repartee is, "You tell me". While it has provided me some respite, it failed to throw up an answer. Well, it is stupid to expect solutions from bureaucratic processes. In the instant case, the result of the exercise reeked of participant bias. Respondents from my phonebook unanimously declared that he looks like me while those from my wife's bet their life that he resembled her.

At this point, it is only fair that a few facts be disclosed for a correct understanding of the results. It happens that the arresting feature of my little one is his nose. Broad and flat, like both his parents have. Just that it looks cute on him and functional on us. For my wife, it isn't her best feature; for me, it isn't the worst. We have made peace with ours. But our maid, who gives the boy his daily massage, unfailingly nudges his nose upwards. My mother, who has been there and done that, smirks at both her effort and my wife's hope. I, however, have no qualms with it. Long ago, somewhere around the time I realized the finality of my nasal aesthetics,  I irretrievably concluded that sharpness of nose is inversely related to that of the mind. I cite our only Prime Minister without a majority to successfully complete his term as the best testimony to my hypothesis.

So when people take his nose as the clinching evidence to settle the issue of his resemblance, it is only natural that it would throw up mixed results. The whole process further reinforced my indifference on the subject. No matter how far I look back into the genealogy of either of my son's parents, I hardly find anything that is even remotely remarkable. But what amuses me is that before he learned to talk, he managed to polarize an entire bunch of mature educated adults within a fortnight of his arrival into this world. Probably, it is the telltale sign of the times we live in.