Beauty
What is beauty? No, what is it REALLY?
Is everything that is visually pleasing called beauty, or is there more to this word than the definition we humans seem to have assigned to this word.
If you google the word up, you’ll get the following definition:-
“a combination of qualities, such as shape, colour, or form, that pleases the aesthetic senses, especially the sight”
That is a classic example of how certain things have been hardwired into our minds that we seem to take casually, and I won’t be surprised if I asked you what beauty is and you answered somewhat in lines with the above definition.
Having said that, I solemnly beg to differ.
Here’s my theory:-
I see beauty not in the eyes, but in the heart. To expand; I see beauty in something that extends beyond what I can see, beyond what is said and done, in something that is not easily available to my five senses for processing, and in something that isn’t “visually appealing”.
Let me hold your hand and take you through work-a-day, mainstream examples.
- We post pictures that our visually appealing, we curate our content in such a way that we think has a tendency to interest other people and mind you only in a visual sense, so much so that the entire concept is devoid of meaning at the end.
Things that get popular these days or which catch the attention of a majority are ones that are discounting on our senses.
2. This is somewhat funny, every year we have this fest in our college called cul-ah. A large number of outsiders get to visit us, and participate in various events of interest. Since, Our’s is a girl’s college, seeing a guy is a feast to behold, and we drool over the ones that our sexually appealing, and don’t even bother to throw a second glance at someone who is not. Worse is when girl’s twist their expressions to disgust at seeing a “not so hot guy”.
But the question is, Do we even know that person? That “not so hot guy”? for all we know, he could have a heart of gold, he could have done something that we can’t even think of, he could have seen the world through different lenses. But what do we know, we only care about the ones that our appealing to us, and it seems conversational advances are a prerogative of the “sexy”. Others are deemed as uncouth, and “Oh my god, not worth our time”.
Before you clap, I am guilty of being the same way, but an incident in my life, changed this shallow perspective.
This particular incidence is still vivid to memory. It was vacation time and I had just finished giving exams for my 3rd semester. I was heading back to my native place: Himachal; and my flight from Bangalore to chandigarh got delayed by seven hours, they shifted me to a flight to Delhi. Consequently, I had to board a bus from Delhi at 9:00 PM. I was travelling alone, and a man took advantage of that situation and came and sat right next to me, after a while he began touching me inappropriately, bear in mind this is a volvo bus, so this brat belongs to a well to do family (his attire pointing to the same). Upon raising my voice I got five men to my rescue, the Conductor and the Driver the most active of all, the situation got so worse that they had to hand him over to pcr. Ensuing the incidence was there care for a stranger. They made sure that I reached home safely, till the point my parents came to pick me up.
I realised how shallow I was all this while, for judging and making assumptions on the basis of people’s looks. In the aforementioned situation, it was the “uncouth”, “not well to do”, “not so good looking” that came to my protection. You could easily dismiss this by saying, “so what, it was their duty”, well, wasn’t it the duty of that man to be a good citizen in the first place, and mind his own business? I was so overwhelmed by the way those people handled the situation that I decided to give them a box of chocolates.
I believe this is a corollary to the points that I’ve discussed in my previous post, we seem to hover around labels a lot that we fail to see what’s beyond them and based on the generalizations made on different levels of the society we go about living life. The whole point of the article is to help you see beauty beyond labels, and beyond all sensory pleasures.
I myself am a victim of the same, I get liked for my sharp looks, and my fair skin, but if you ask me, I’ll tell you, very few ACTUALLY care going beyond those features and seeing me for what I really am. Honestly speaking I only have one person who actually knows me for what I truly am.
I have more followers on Instagram than on medium, where I actually write what I feel and something that has the potential to make a difference. I get more likes on my instagram post than on the ones that I post here.
It’s like we don’t want to make any effort, perhaps that’s why the entertainment industry is booming like nobody’s business.
Likewise, there are a lot of examples and concepts where I feel something is just not quite right.
Before you move on with patterns of life, ask yourself this question..
Is there more to beauty than what meets the eye?
Also, I’d tell you from what I’ve come to know so far, Beauty isn’t in objects or things that come easy to your senses, it is in the patterns and contrasts of life, but I’d rather you explore more of that on your own, and form your own sound perception.
Thank you!
