What’s your Idea about Beauty?

To answer this term, we need to define the term beauty. Beauty is defined as “a quality that gives pleasure to all the senses”.

So we see here that beauty is not just something that is pleasing to the eyes, beauty is something that should invigorate all the senses of our body.

In my Blog, I will be comparing the beauties created by two supreme entities i.e. Mother nature & Human-beings & who has the right to claim to have made more beautiful things in this world.

Let me start with a short but true story. Once in the court of the great Mughal Emperor Akbar (Indian Ruler from 1556-1605 during the Mughal dynasty) a question arose in the mind of the Great King, he asked his ministers whom they thought could create more beautiful objects. In the opinion of the King, nobody could beat nature, he thus asked his ministers to prove him wrong.

All the ministers answered but were not able to give the King satisfactory answers. That’s when the court’s wisest minister, Birbal, answered. He requested the king to give him two days to answer the question.

The very next day he asked the court’s royal Gardener to get the palace’s most exquisite Rose. The rose chosen by the Gardener was not just the biggest, it was also the one which had the brightest petals & had an aroma that left any of it’s admirers with a sense of possessing that rose.

The gardener was then asked by Birbal to present the fresh rose to the King. When the gardener gave the rose to the King he told him (as advised by Birbal) that here was a rose that pleased the senses in all respects. It was pleasing to the eyes; nose & it left the admirer with a sense of well being. He thus convinced the King that it was nature that produced this wonderful object that the whole world could look at & derive pleasure from.

The King, quite satisfied with his answer gave him two Gold coins.

Three days later, a goldsmith came to the court & with him was a gift he claimed was fit only for a King. The King on hearing this was excited to know what it was. The goldsmith then patiently opened the gift for him. In it was a Red ruby cut in the shape of a rose, the stem was made from pure gold & the whole rose was encased in a Silver casket. The King was so pleased with the gift that he gave the Goldsmith two hundred Gold coins.

Birbal, who observed all the happenings from a distance, asked the King as to why he gave the goldsmith 200 coins while he gave the Royal gardener just two Gold coins. The King innocently replied that the Goldsmith had obviously put in more effort into creating such a beautiful rose. To which Birbal reminded the King that earlier he thought nature was a better designer. The King then wisely admitted that beauty can be made by both nature & humans alike.

But this is as far as the story of the King goes. How would you as the reader of this blog rate beauty? I’ve always heard that beauty is relative. But how do you rate any beautiful object. What is your reference bench-mark? How can we say that ‘The Mona-Lisa’ is a Jaw dropping beauty while we would say some other paintings are just beautiful? Can anybody give marks to beauty & if so, on what basis?

So, to conclude, the term Beauty can never really be rated. Probably Engineers can come up with a calculation for Beauty, Economists come up with a theory and analysts maybe come up with a detailed analysis. But however hard we try or imagine we cannot really assign a specific number or value to beauty.

The adage ‘beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder’ has now put me in a dilemma. Can anyone enlighten me on this one?