Thought Detonation #13 – Real Beauty

You know I was thinking to write something about beauty today. To my greatest surprise, I wasn’t able to “judge” what beauty is! Trying to write about real beauty, when you don’t know what beauty is in the first place, is actually something dumb. There were a few things that I could associate with beauty; like mother’s love, selfless and tender and white in colour. It is beautiful.  Or a walk in dark as the night sky is illuminated by a million stars, without caring of what was back home or what you have to do tomorrow, when you actually live that moment and look at the stillness of moon. This ,surely, would be beautiful. How about sitting ashore a long lonely stretch of coastline, watching the sun dip behind waves, with orange sky and red horizons, as the sea sings you a constant tune and steady hush. How would it feel to reduce the tempo of your thoughts to the rhythm of hushhhhh…Beautiful. What about being a three year old as you see you daddy bring home ice cream. Even more beautiful. How about watching your three year old eat the ice cream you bought? How about finding the girl who just teased me and went away that day? I would get me mad, beautiful. How about sitting in garden early morning as you watch the bees collecting nectar from you flowers, and you let them steal it without slightest of reconsideration, without a phone or a reminder to disturb you, so you could just sit and ponder upon what beauty was. How about revisiting the time you first touched a girl? Feel again what you felt when lips touched? Ah..Heavens. Does it really matter to know what beauty is? I am still not able to generalize what beauty is, would it be objective? Can a person declare that a thing is absolute beauty? I don’t know, and I am no body to declare what beauty is. But this doesn’t stop me from recognizing things that are beautiful. It’s like I don’t how to fix an engine but I know how to drive. I don’t know what beauty is, but I know my bike and me on a lonely highway is beautiful, I know memories of youth with a pal who got shot down in riots are beautiful. These might not be “beauty” themselves, but they are full of beauty,”beauty-ful”.


As I continue writing, a lot of my own perceptions of beauty are changing. Since I am not writing from a judge’s point of view, I am writing down the whole thought process, and also sorting out my own feelings as I proceed. I always thought of beauty to be something rigid. Though I was thoughtful, and what people consider to be a man of deep thoughts, yet I always thought of beauty to be like a solid block, or table; which had distinct boundary, so that we could judge if something was beautiful or not beautiful. But what if I say that something is beautiful and you don’t agree to it? The analogy of a block must have a flaw. Then is beauty more of a fluid that can flow? Like air? Perhaps it is. It must be just the way we look at the world. Surely there might be a few who find all the air in world beautiful, who would be amazed by each and everything they see and feel happy for everything that exists in this universe. But I haven’t met anyone as such, have you? I know even you have not. No one can find anything beautiful in a slap rendered by a random fellow pedestrian without a reason while walking down eight kilometers to home after your car broke down on flyway.(Not to mention you have forgotten the flat keys back in your car. It always happens this way.) So beauty isn’t something solid, it isn’t something fluid, so what is it? And why the hell am I bothered? I have already burned enough of my blood thinking on this (probably of more worth than the prize money I may win in the World’s best blog championship).

*Silence*
*Thought Detonates*

“Beauty” is a variable.
We all have our own boxes of beauty; our own blocks what I am just casually calling beauty-sensible domains. We all keep our boxes in different orientations, and our boxes have different sizes. And these boxes or domains of different people intersect obliquely with each other. That’s the reason why we may have same, or different views regarding beauty of a subject. It may so happen that your box and mine may have a common volume, if so, then we both will feel a thing beautiful which fits in that area. It’s like saying even you feel roses are beautiful like me. It means “roses” fall into the common volume of our domains. However, there may be parts of your box that do not share common volume with mine. So it would be though you love roses, I don’t. It means in this case “roses” are not in our common volume, they are in your beauty-sensible domain, but not mine. So the mystery is solved! What falls in your box, looks beautiful to you; and what falls in mine, seems beautiful to me. It is just a matter of chance that a subject may fall in our common domain, so we both feel it’s beautiful. We must not get stereotyped just because most of the people have a large common domain. BEAUTY CANNOT BE GENERALISED. Just because a hundred people said something is not-beautiful doesn’t mean the 101th person will feel the same.

So great was the soul who said “beauty resides in the eyes of the bearer.” It truly does. This is the “real beauty” of “beauty”.  The kind of variation it inherits. It is truly a variable. It is a feeling, and it cannot be generalized. Real beauty, to me, is a big box. Your domain of seeing someone else’s beauty is your real beauty. The bigger your box, the more beauty you possess. It’s not waxed skin, painted lips or face pack. It is a way to live. “Real beauty” is “real” beauty.

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