Smile Pinki

Smile Pinki (2008) is a 39-minute documentary directed by Megan Mylan. The film shows the story of a poor girl in rural India whose life is transformed when she receives free surgery to correct her cleft lip. The documentary was made in Hindi and Bhojpuri, and won the 81st Academy Award for Best Documentary (Short Subject).

Overview

Pinki Sonkar is a five-year-old girl who is living with a severe cleft lip in one of the poorest areas of India. Not allowed to attend school at her native village, Rampur Dahaba village in Mirzapur, near Varanasi, and ostracized because of her deformity, Pinki lives a life of quiet desperation as she waits and wonders if she will ever receive the cleft surgery. Her parents are unable to afford the surgery that she desperately needs. By chance, Pinki's parents meet a social worker one day who is traveling village to village, gathering patients for a hospital that provides free cleft lip surgery to thousands of poor children each year through The Smile Train program. The surgery was performed at G.S. Memorial Hospital, by plastic surgeon Dr. Subodh Kumar Singh, who along with Pinki attended the 81st Academy Award ceremony. She was invited to toss up the coin in Wimbledon Final, 2013 in London.

Smile Train

Smile Train is a 501(c)(3) organization, the largest charity providing corrective surgery for children with cleft lips and palates.

Headquartered in New York City and founded in 1999, Smile Train provides free corrective cleft surgery in 87 countries, training local doctors and providing hospital funding for the procedures.

According to Forbes magazine, Smile Train is the 72nd largest charity in America.

History

Smile Train was created in 1998 by Brian Mullaney and Charles Wang, who had previously worked with Operation Smile, another charity focused on correcting cleft lips and palates. They felt the most efficient way to provide cleft surgery was to train and support local doctors rather than to fly in Western doctors to provide surgeries in poor, developing countries. Local doctors would also be able to provide care year-round rather than the limited engagements of the "mission-based" model.

In 1999, Smile Train began providing corrective surgeries in China. The charity worked with American and Chinese presidents at the time, George H.W. Bush and Jiang Zemin, in the planning of Smile Train's first operation in China. As of 2013, the charity had provided approximately 300,000 corrective surgeries in partnership with 397 local hospitals within China.

List of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic characters

My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic is an animated television series based on the My Little Pony toyline created by American toy and game manufacturer Hasbro. It features characters and settings developed by Lauren Faust, who sought to create more in-depth characters than the stereotypical "girly" icons used in previous iterations of the franchise. The series began airing on the United States Hub Network (currently Discovery Family) cable channel on October 10, 2010.

The show follows a studious unicorn pony named Twilight Sparkle as her mentor Princess Celestia guides her to learn about friendship in the town of Ponyville. Twilight becomes close friends with five other ponies: earth ponies Applejack and Pinkie Pie, pegasus ponies Rainbow Dash and Fluttershy, and unicorn Rarity. Each represents a different facet of friendship, and Twilight discovers herself to be a key part of the magical artifacts, the Elements of Harmony. The six ponies—collectively known as the "Mane Six"—share adventures and help out other residents of Ponyville, while working out the troublesome moments in their own friendships, eventually leading to Twilight's ascension as a winged unicorn known as an alicorn.

Smile

A smile is a facial expression formed primarily by flexing the muscles at the sides of the mouth. Some smiles include a contraction of the muscles at the corner of the eyes, an action known as a "Duchenne smile". Smiles performed without the eye contraction can be perceived as "fake".

Among humans, smiling is an expression denoting pleasure, sociability, happiness, or amusement. It is distinct from a similar but usually involuntary expression of anxiety known as a grimace. Although cross-cultural studies have shown that smiling is a means of communication throughout the world, there are large differences between different cultures, with some using smiles to convey confusion or embarrassment.

Historical background

Primatologist Signe Preuschoft traces the smile back over 30 million years of evolution to a "fear grin" stemming from monkeys and apes who often used barely clenched teeth to portray to predators that they were harmless. The smile may have evolved differently among species and especially among humans. Apart from Biology as an academic discipline that interprets the smile, those who study kinesics and psychology such as Freitas-Magalhaes view the smile as an affect display that can communicate feelings such as love, happiness, pride, contempt, and embarrassment.

Pinki

Pinki may refer to: