WHAT IS BEAUTY?
"It's a beauty", my dad would exclaim, when he'd see a flick of the wrist and a shot that went across the boundary. That was about the time I was studying the Harappa and Mohenjo Daro civilisations in school, and 'beauty' would conjure up images of the caption below a picture of a young girl's statue discovered among the Indus Valley ruins.
An age of difference here, but the connection's not as tenuous as it appears. Essentially, beauty is what hits the eye -- or the other senses -- and gets lodged in our sub-conscious over time, through repitition.
All our overtly expressed notions of beauty relate to concepts of immediate recall: nature, women, music and so on... It's primal, if it relates to the senses, and quite possible that images and concepts of beauty are stored in our collective unconscious as a human race.
A study recently released in the journal Psychological Science showed that what we think is attractive or beautiful is whatever requires the least amount of effort.
A lot like watching television: A soporific for the mind. There's an entire generation out there that's picking up its concept of beauty (read attractiveness) from Paris Hilton and Victoria Spice. Imagine that.
It's no surprise, then, that advertising relies heavily on these very concepts of 'beauty' to peddle products -- from two-wheelers to cosmetics to even homes. A favourite hunting ground for feminists. Naomi Wolf argues, in her 1991 best-seller, The Beauty Myth, that the old myth that women were fulfilled as housewives and mothers was gradually replaced by advertisers with what she calls "the beauty myth." To be accepted in the world of the liberated and independent “new woman,” she says, one has to meet rigid standards of slimness, beauty and fashion.
Interesting, how she puts it: "How to make sure that busy, stimulated working women would keep consuming at the levels they had done when they had all day to do so and little else of interest to occupy them? A new ideology was necessary that would compel the same insecure consumerism; that ideology must be, unlike that of the Feminine Mystique (Betty Friedan's “feminine mystique” -- advertisers consciously manipulate their portrayals of women to ensure they serve as good consumers), a briefcase-sized neurosis that the working woman could take with her to the office..."
Feminine mystique or not, feminist movement or not, one thing's for sure: In an increasingly consumerist, appearance-obsessed world such as the one we live in, we constantly get "constructed", interpreted images of skin-deep beauty. Maya, perhaps? A grand illusion? In all this clutter, you wonder: What IS true beauty?
And what kind of beauty gives you happiness?
'Beauty is truth, truth beauty — that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know,' said John Keats. My criteria come pretty close: Compassion, above all. An all-encompassing love, irrespective of prejudices. Plus honesty, confidence (a certain self-assuredness), and tonnes of creative energy.
