Truth about Beauty

"Beauty lies in the eyes of beholder" goes the saying but do you think that there is any truth in it. As reality is always stark and biting so as our attitude towards beauty. John Keats the famous romantic poet has said "Beauty is truth and truth beauty, that is all ye know and all ye need to know." But perhaps most of us in real life do not see any example which can authenticate this claim that truth is beautiful. Beauty means something which attracts your attention and makes you feel joyful from inside. May it be a beautiful scene, a beautiful atmosphere or a beautiful living thing; we have certain parameters to measure the beauty of such things. These parameters vary from person to person and from situation to situation. Something that is very beautiful for you at some point of time can not be the same at some other point of time.

Keats has also said, "A thing of beauty is a joy for ever." My objection to this statement is again got supported by real life examples where beauty is never eternal and we have seen many beautiful things changing their status by becoming callous and dull. A man married to a girl after seeing her before marriage but after marriage he left her only on the ground that she is not beautiful. Many beautiful people don’t look so beautiful when you meet them often and see their real personality. Moreover beauty of a person resides more in his quality and less in his physical appearance. If you like some person for some reasons that person becomes beautiful for you. It also leads to the conclusion that beauty can be superficial and artificial on one hand and can be real and lasting on the other. It depends on you what kind of beauty you prefer. Some people are beautiful looking persons and some are not so beautiful (I’ll not say ‘ugly’ as that word has already been used in other reference) but their worth make them beautiful for others.

I also know a couple who was considered odd because the husband was highly qualified and handsome and the wife was twelfth failed and from a rural background, but kudos to the husband who groomed his wife to match his standards. Now the wife is superbly clad beautiful woman who can be a proud of any party with her talent in singing and matching her husband with no less quality. Beauty should not be given preference when it comes to real friendship or human ties. I have the experience of being appreciated as ‘the most charming person’ by a person on one hand and considered to be ugly duckling by some other person. Sometimes it depends on the person’s mood to see things according to his convenience and temperament.

If we see our film industry which is flooded with beautiful and smart people but there are some established actors who perhaps do not qualify our parameters for beauty; take Shahrukh Khan who has pouted nose, dark colour, shaggy look and not so handsome personality. But he is the heartthrob of millions of people just because of his hidden quality to perform excellently and perfectly. That means some additional quality in a person makes him beautiful rather than his real looks. Take another example from television, in ‘Office Office’ Pankaj Kapoor is acting so beautifully that his ugly looks is nowhere felt. There are many such examples like Smita Patil, Shabana Aazmi, Om Puri, Ajay Devgan, Nana Patekar, Dada Kondke who do not have beautiful looks but have some tremendous qualities which make them beautiful for thousands of people. Here beauty is skin deep and not superficial.

Ugliness is associated with something unlikable. At some point of time we feel somebody unlikable and loathsome which can amount to ugliness but after some twist of events we start changing our opinion about the person and the person starts looking beautiful to us. Koutilya, Socrates, George Bernard Shaw are well-known for their ugliness of appearance but on the other hand they are still remembered for their excellent qualities as economist, philosopher and novelist par excellence. Keeping a feeling of positive thinking we can see so many things around us beautiful and charming. When you start looking for beauty around you, you become beautiful for others. This is the secret of a beautiful life where ugliness does not interfere with you. Try to see beauty in nature, in people around you and in inanimate things as well. Then you need not say what T. S. Eliot has sung in ‘Four Quartets’, "Time and the bell have buried the day, The black cloud carries the beauty away."
(Published in Hitavada on 12th June 2008)