Skip to main content

Beauty and Youth

Beauty is young - always!


One of my favourite writers, Franz Kafka, said that the young people are happy because they have the ability to see beauty. “Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old,” he added.

I was always an admirer of beauty. The only problem was that some self-appointed custodians of morality, during my youth, thought that my concept of beauty was too gynocentric and hence sinful. Like most members of their species, these custodians were very religious people. Moreover, in my case, they happened to be all Christians.

Woman is a perversion, according to Christian theology. She was the cause of mankind’s eviction from the biblical Paradise. Even centuries could not wash away her guilt and so Saint Paul would advise Timothy (2:12) never to let a woman teach or have authority over a man. “She must be silent.” Nothing less.

My admiration of feminine beauty was associated with my own perversions by the moralists in my life. I don’t deny that I had a fair share of perversions though I always thought that my aesthetics was a natural principle. If a young man is not drawn to the charms of a beautiful young woman, he should be checked for perversion.

Well, I outgrew that aesthetics as time passed. That’s also a natural principle, I think. When it comes to nature, however, you can never be too sure. The fearfully symmetrical tiger of William Blake brutally assaulting a graceful gazelle whose twin fawns find their biblical analogy in the breasts of the wise Solomon’s beloved is also obeying a natural principle. I was no tiger anyway and kept my aesthetics to myself. I didn’t even dare to write poems like Solomon about female organs more innocuous than breasts.

I was more fond of smiles, in fact. Today, as a man in the autumn of his life, having seen plenty of life’s seductions and addictions, I still remain a lover of smiles. If you have seen smiles that come genuinely from the heart, you’ll understand my aesthetics easily.

Of course, I admire all other forms of beauty too. I love flowers, for example, though they become metaphors for evanescence in the Bible. Prophet Isiah, for instance, compared the littleness of his people’s faith to “the flowers of the field.” I love rivers and mountains, literature and philosophy, the Taj Mahal in Agra and the St Paul’s Cathedral in London. I love all things beautiful.

Beauty has a heavenly grace. It refreshes our souls as nothing else can if only we learn to let it do its job. I would dare to paraphrase a verse from the Rig-Veda: “Let beauty come to us from every side.”  (1-89-i)

You will remain forever young if you let that happen to you!


Comments

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
47 comments
Read more

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...
2 comments
Read more

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...
18 comments
Read more

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...
16 comments
Read more

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. ...
16 comments
Read more