Beyond the surface
They say beauty lies in the eyes of a beholder.
It’s true.
Especially the bit where lying is involved.
Each one of us see what we wish to. At any given moment, no two people can possibly observe the same object due to difference of angles and the resulting perception. However, we can always generalize our views and build our respective viewpoints. This silent understanding owes itself to years of learning to live together in a society.
“You saw that?”
“Yes, yes.”
Contradictions can arise under all circumstances. They don’t always wait for deceit to coax them out of our pores like termites. Often, differences in outlook hail from the most benevolent of places. If we look at the existing chasms in the world today, you’ll notice how everybody feels that they are innately correct. Everybody seems to look at things in a manner that suits their stomach. If something is out of your line, it’s wrong for you. Who decided this line of vision? You, who else?
We are in 2017 and yet we can’t escape the binary trap of good and bad. The more intriguing part: is it always going to be like this? Would we ever reach a stage where we’ll accept the charade we put on just to stay in the game? Or shall we collapse even before we raise our eyebrows to our inherent hypocrisy? Most worryingly, are we capable of seeing things for the way they are instead of moulding them to fit our narrow lanes of (mis)understanding?
One fine example of facing such uncomfortable questions is how we define beauty today. Humans have been chasing the B-word for millennia. We seek it because we like to believe that we somehow embody it. Everything around us, under the sky, is beautiful because it doesn’t know how else to be. We, on the other hand, dictate our terms of appearance and actions. And that’s why we find it assailing to distinguish between beautiful and good-looking.
Isn’t beauty supposed to be immortal in theory? If yes, how can we let age take the pedestal in this grand decision? If no, shouldn’t a beautiful person be less about how they look and more about how they make others look in their presence?
With age, our skin gets worse. No surprises there. Our life is a limited edition. And age has a massive part to play. A person who looked amazing in her 20s won’t necessarily repeat her bash in her 50s. But a person who was beautiful, thanks to the way she loved others throughout her life, would sustain the elements of beauty much longer. The difference between these two personalities being the latter doesn’t even care about beauty. It comes naturally to her. The reason why we’ve bestowed too much importance to external beauty is we are insecure bunch of cretins. Wherever we go, we project our insecurities on others. We tend to celebrate the opposites without realizing that the cause of celebration is feckless.
That said, some people start ugly due to their lack of control on their weaknesses; they live miserably and yet manage to grow into beautiful beings. This personal revolution must be the most difficult journey undertaken in the history of humankind. But then, those who’ve hurdled over the myopic definitions of beauty often end up making others feel beautiful and in the process, they themselves look better.
