BEAUTY

The very word ‘Beauty’ stirs a lot of commotion within us .There exists strange and challenging opinions about this topic. My grandmother would give its definition as ‘Truth is beauty’. But is this it? Do we tend to see beauty in truth?

John Keats in a poem which we all must have read said, ‘A thing of beauty is a joy forever.’ The dictionary tells us that a thing of beauty is a thing which arouses our admiration, to which something in us responds with approval and delight as soon as our eyes behold it

Do here comes the famous adage, ‘Beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder’. So is beauty really lives in the eyes of the beholder or there is something more than it meets the eyes stating beauty as a relative term is less dangerous when compared to truth  or virtue. Hence, something beautiful to my eyes may not be beautiful to others .I find the blooming of the tender  leaves or a small bird trying to such  the nectar out of the flowers as beautiful but my sister may not. So, how we define which things are beautiful and which are not? Do a specific section of people get to choose?

            Thousands of years of human civilization have made it possible to distinguish between the things and that are beautiful and things that are not. In these thousand years, opinions about beauty were made to undergone substantial changes. It mostly favoured the ruling classes and the elites. If the Africans dominated the whole world instead of the British then in India we might have experienced the craze to become dark.

            In our present generation, countries don’t need political power to influence the masses; economic colonization is enough. They determine what beauty is all about. Moreover, the concept of beauty is inculcated within each of us from a tender age. We digest their concept without thinking twice. A child doesn't have the mental tools to think critically. It leaves behind an impact; a mental footprint that transcends adulthood. The companies with the help of mass media give us a standard measure of beauty. It includes height, complexion, eyes and hair and the list will go on. It is mass illusion in its best and even an educated, rational person finds it hard not to accept the conventional standards. From my own personal experience, I can say when I kept my hair long which is straight and soft, I was taken as one of the beautiful girls. It is not so when I cut my hair really short .Hence, here we can say, we are taught that long hair is sign of beauty other things remaining unchanged .Some people might argue that long hair really looks beautiful than short hair and it is in no way manipulation. It is not humanly possible for me to make every one agree on a single idea. If we go through the various world cultures at different times, we can easily see the varied and contrasting definition of beauty .Hence, there is no ‘one size fits all’ situation.

            Lastly, physical beauty of humans can be very well classified as pretty. No matter how much we love cakes, we easily tire out of eating them. True beauty is invisible to eyes. It can be only be perceived by our souls. Hence, we should give up the notion that beauty is pleasing to our eyes. The eyes are just the organ of sight; it is the brain that sends us back the signals. Brain sends it signals back along with our already encrypted information of what is beautiful and what is not.