#AtoZChallenge - 4-25-2017 - Letter U
U for Ugly
Just as beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder, so too does ugliness. However, the larger
issue is: our tendency in general, to associate one kind of beauty with
another. Or refusing to believe that Ugly is one facet of Beauty too. That tendency is only human-----and it is a direct result of the
imaginative chip in our brain circuits.
Literature and
cinema are full of this kind of lively imagination. There was a V.Shantaram
movie in which Sandhya is secretly a radio singer going by the name of Kokila (nightingale/
koel). Her everyday avatar is that of an ugly servant in a big household. (The
ugliness is symbolized by a liberal coating of boot polish on her face! That
topic is another subject by itself—why is melanin equated with ugliness?) The
younger son of the house listens to her songs on the radio, and paints a
wonderful picture of her and falls in love with her. She sees the painting and
is loath to reveal herself, because she doesn’t want to rudely awaken him from
his dreams. Another Shantaram movie, “Navrang” had a similar theme----the
poet’s muse is a beautiful woman---it is actually his wife but neither of them
realizes it and the wife is tormented by the thought of the poet being totally
enslaved by the muse. The husband is
disgusted by the ordinary, normal persona of the wife and has no time for her.
And of course the much-celebrated-and-ridiculed Satyam Shivam Sundaram, where
the hero assumes the heroine is beautiful because her voice is.
In the legend of
Udayana and Vasavadatta (read your Amar Chitra Kathas!), Princess Vasavadatta’s
father arranges for her to learn a special musical mantra from King Udayana, to
charm elephants. Since Udayana is his enemy and he doesn’t want his daughter
falling for the enemy, he arranges for a curtain between them, telling Udayana
that his student is an old hunchback woman, and telling Vasavadatta that her
teacher is a leper. However during the course of a lesson, the princess keeps
making mistakes, which provokes the wrath of the royal guru. He reprimands her,
and calls her a hunchback. She retaliates by calling him a leper, they part the
curtains in anger, and of course the expected happens.
While such a
premise is interesting material for literary purposes, all of us would do well
to steer clear of such filmi speculations in real life!
We are all besotted by images of what we individually consider beauty. For instance, I do like beautiful women, but keep a distance from them because in my head I've already perceived them to be arrogant and intimidating. On the other hand, I find soft-spoken girls very attractive, maybe because I assume them to be kind and gentle and non-judgmental. Everyone has their own parameters to judge beauty.
ReplyDeleteWell written ☺
Thank you very much CRD! Your observations add another facet to the topic!
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