Skip to main content

Admirer of Beauty


John Keats admired beauty.  Otherwise he could not have written the poem ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’.  The poem narrates the story of a knight in the middle ages who met a beautiful woman in some wilderness.  She, the beauty, allowed him to take her on his horseback to some places as he wished until finally she took him to her cave and lulled him to sleep.  When the knight woke up, the beauty had disappeared.  He went in search of that beauty all over the valley. Keats’ poem ends with the statement that the knight is still searching for the beautiful woman in that valley years and years after she deserted him.  You would think he was a ghost in case you met him there in that valley. 

Seekers of beauty became ghosts in Keats’ era (early 19th century)

But Keats belonged to an era when people, at least some people, quested after truth which they thought was beauty.  “Beauty is truth and truth beauty.”  Didn’t Keats write that too?  And you don’t need to know anything more than that, Keats said that too.  How idealistic!  No wonder the guy died at the age of 26, in poverty.  Anyone who equates truth with beauty cannot live long.  Should not, in fact.  How can we, the pragmatic people, bother to care for truth which is equal to beauty and beauty which is equal to truth?

That’s why our own Gabriel Marquez, who died a few days back at the age of 87 having relished the luxury of life, wrote the short story ‘Sleeping beauty and the airplane.’  In that story, the narrator feels he is lucky to have a beautiful woman on a seat next to his in the New York-bound airplane.  But the woman falls asleep as soon as the flight takes off.  The narrator is left to admiring the sleeping beauty until the end of the flight.  His indirect efforts to wake her up are all in vain.  At the end of the flight, the beauty “disappeared into the sun of today in the Amazon jungle of New York.”

Beauty lies in the Amazon jungle of New York.   We, Indians, will soon have the Amazon jungle of New York coming to India too.  Our economy is poised for a revolutionary rejuvenation.  The Amazon jungle of New York coming to the starving millions of India’s wilderness is going to be a new miracle of 21st century.  The revolution has begun today, 26 May 2014.  A new Beauty is going to be born in India.  You and I will be Keats’ knight in the wilderness or Marquez’s admirer in the airplane.  There is no other choice, I think.  Marquez is a better option, of course: let the beauty sleep and let us make money writing stories about her instead of letting her bewitch us. 

Comments

  1. Let us brace ourselves for the revolution to come. Of the two I would still prefer Keats.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The Revolution has just begun. There's a whole new world awaiting us! Keatsian quest will be in vain, I assure you.

      Delete
  2. Beauty is truth,
    Truth beauty
    That's all ye know
    All ye need to know

    I know your blogs
    I confess I'm the admirer of your pen
    A marvellous creation indeed.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thanks, M. Your knowing me personally helps avoid a lot of misunderstanding. There are some readers whom I perplex apparently with my "ravings" :)

      Delete
    2. ravings - Please read my reply comment to the blog The Enemy Within. A coincidental one.

      Delete
  3. And I know that truth takes refuge is such unheard blogs. Modi can't hear them too and if he hears, Keats' fate might befall truth.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Interestingly, the beauty in Marquez's story is described as "Oriental". We the people of the Orient are very resilient, we will manage in Modi Raj too.

      Delete
  4. Do you think Jews weren't resilient during pogroms? If they had had, how did it help them? To some extent people who helped them out of concentration camps would have been resilient. But when in the jaws of death...

    India today should never become that horrible place. Because the Tamil's voice was not heard at the center, you see, sir.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Please read the article related to the same at

    http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/reel-it-in-poland-hollywood/1/357484.html

    where there is a mention of Scindler's List, a movie about the rescue of Jews from the Concentration Camps.

    ReplyDelete
  6. By any chance if you get a copy of Schindler's List please share it with me, sir. I too will if I.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I suggested the students of class 10 to watch it if they can while they are at home for the vacation. I had given the necessary introduction too. I'll see if a copy can be obtained.

      The Tamil problem is just the beginning, M. Unless Mr Modi handles certain issues with a lot of care and astuteness, there will be serious consequences. This precisely was my apprehension and still is.

      Delete
  7. Beauty lies in the eyes of beholder! No?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yes, Amit, and it is precisely that inner beauty, subjective beauty, which really matters. All the rest is drama or politics or both.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

Don Bosco

Don Bosco (16 Aug 1815 - 31 Jan 1888) In Catholic parlance, which flows through my veins in spite of myself, today is the Feast of Don Bosco. My life was both made and unmade by Don Bosco institutions. Any great person can make or break people because of his followers. Religious institutions are the best examples. I’m presenting below an extract from my forthcoming book titled Autumn Shadows to celebrate the Feast of Don Bosco in my own way which is obviously very different from how it is celebrated in his institutions today. Do I feel nostalgic about the Feast? Not at all. I feel relieved. That’s why this celebration. The extract follows. Don Bosco, as Saint John Bosco was popularly known, had a remarkably good system for the education of youth.   He called it ‘preventive system’.   The educators should be ever vigilant so that wrong actions are prevented before they can be committed.   Reason, religion and loving kindness are the three pillars of that syste...

Coffee can be bitter

The dawns of my childhood were redolent of filtered black coffee. We were woken up before the birds started singing in the lush green village landscape outside home. The sun would split the darkness of the eastern sky with its splinter of white radiance much after we children had our filtered coffee with a small lump of jaggery. Take a bite of the jaggery and then a sip of the coffee. Coffee was a ritual in our home back then. Perhaps our parents believed it would jolt our neurons awake and help us absorb our lessons before we set out on the 4-kilometre walk to school after all the morning rituals at home. After high school, when I left home for further studies at a distant place, the ritual of the morning coffee stopped. It resumed a whole decade later when I completed my graduation and took up a teaching job in Shillong. But I had lost my taste for filtered coffee by then; tea took its place. Plain tea without milk – what is known as red tea in most parts of India. Coffee ret...

Relatives and Antidepressants

One of the scenes that remain indelibly etched in my memory is from a novel of Malayalam writer O V Vijayan. Father and little son are on a walk. Father tells son, “Walk carefully, son, otherwise you may fall down.” Son: “What will happen if I fall?” Father: "Relatives will laugh.” I seldom feel comfortable with my relatives. In fact, I don’t feel comfortable in any society, but relatives make it more uneasy. The reason, as I’ve understood, is that your relatives are the last people to see any goodness in you. On the other hand, they are the first ones to discover all your faults. Whenever certain relatives visit, my knees buckle and the blood pressure shoots up. I behave quite awkwardly. They often describe my behaviour as arising from my ego, which used to be a oversized in yesteryear. I had a few such visitors the other day. The problem was particularly compounded by their informing me that they would be arriving by about 3.30 pm and actually reaching at about 7.30 pm. ...

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...