Voices.

This is what I look like:

This is what you would assume I looked like if you never saw me and only heard my voice:

This is 3-year-old me. And yes, I have maintained my hairstyle since then.

Believe me, it's true. Whenever I answer the phone at home, people always assume I'm a little girl and ask me in their slow "I'm-the-adult-here" way of speaking to hand over the phone to either my "MUMMY" or "GRANDMUMMY". No one believes by just hearing my voice that I'm an adult myself (or very close to being one anyway). 

It makes me wonder, how different can people actually look from the visions you have in your mind whenever you hear their voice? 

This usually happens to me whenever I listen to the radio. I keep on trying to imagine what the radio jockey looks like just by their voice, and I almost always end up wrong. I regularly have to face sore disappointment if I ever come across an RJ's photo, because seriously, they look absolutely NOTHING like their voices make them seem.

An example of what happened to me:

I heard an RJ's voice on the radio, and found it immensely attractive. The guy sounded hot, funny, and cute. But when I googled him, I was disappointed. He wasn't ugly at all, but he was just... average. It's funny how your perceptions of someone become nearly other-worldy when you get attracted to something of theirs. I got attracted to his voice, and forgot that he's a completely normal person, like you and I. An RJ's job requires them to be heard but not seen, and since you need to apply your own imagination to visualize something your hear, it's almost never the same.

This hasn't just happened with me. When I used to live in Dubai, I had Russian neighbors. Whenever I was bored, I would just walk across to their villa and hang out with them. They were always very welcoming, and were so comfortable with me around that they didn't mind me tagging along with them as they went about doing their chores. One of the members in that Russian household, a lady in her late twenties, was ironing her clothes and telling me about her work. It involved talking to a lot of clients via phone call. She told me that one of the clients of the company she worked in had a very lovely voice. He sounded so charming, so warm, so lively, so sexy that she couldn't help but start obsessing over how he must look like. Only using his voice to work on, she constructed an image of him as a good-looking young gentleman who probably wore his suit everywhere and had a crush-worthy face and a powerful presence. When she heard that he would be visiting her office building soon, she was naturally extremely excited. 

Alas, she said, when he entered the office, her entire vision of him collapsed. He was a short, portly man with a large moustache and a beer gut, and looked like he was somewhere around his 50s. He didn't even have a powerful aura! My neighbor told me that he looked somewhat like a hobo. She was understandably very disappointed.

It was like this for her, and I can totally relate.

My neighbor also confided in me that she was almost in love with his voice. I told her about my radio incident, and we agreed that we both had extremely bad luck (haha).

The above incidents make me totally terrified about finding out who really dubs the voice of Behlul (actor Kıvanç Tatlıtuğ) in Urdu for the Turkish drama Aski Memnu that has been airing in Pakistan these days (under the name of Ishq-e-Mamnoon). 

(HOPEFULLY NOT!!!!!)

I have never loved a guy speaking Urdu so much, and I fear that my vision of the dubbing artist as Behlul himself is at risk to be shattered completely. :(

This brings me to a question I wanted to ask you guys: Do you think YOU could ever fall in love with a voice? And if you ever have, then how was the experience? Were you disappointed when you discovered who owned that voice and how they looked like? Or was it like you found the perfect match to your imagination?

(If you answer in the affirmative to the last question, then I swear I'm positively GREEN with envy. Haha.)