Beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder

"A thing of beauty is a joy forever"
- Keats

This is one of my favorite one liners... true, a beautiful thing cheers you up, no matter what it is... it might be a flower, a baby, a poem, a game even a joke... I'm sure everyone will agree to this... now comes the tougher part of it... please define beauty for me... yeah, right, I ask you a question, What is beauty? What is your perception of beauty, in other words, what appears beautiful to you? The answer to this question is a very complex one, and changes with each individual...

if i ask kshitij (the jester of the group), the likely answer would be "a hot chick is beautiful da machan"... hmm, it could be so... that's his opinion... if hot chicks cheer him up (no offense blingy, just an example), hot chicks are indeed beautiful to him...

next, let's ask prabu, the eternal pain (lol, my nickname for him, apart from sadist, necrolyte and a lot of others I'd rather not mention here, lest i get diverted)... prabu's view of beauty could be a magnum sniper rifle, it's long and slender barrel glinting in the sunlight... yeah, that sounds convincing, an AWP (magnum sniper rifle) can definitely be a beautiful thing for prabu...

aren't the two answers we got totally unrelated, i mean, you can't compare a girl with a gun... atleast not in terms of beauty... still, that's what it is... there lies the complexity in this issue... i say, no one can define beauty in general terms... the closest approximation depends on the individual... one could say, "beauty is anything that gives joy"... I could always argue "The anxious look on a girl's face waiting for her loveris beautiful"... there's nothing joyful in that, still it's beauty... likewise, there could be many versions of beauty, each one completely different from the rest...

my opinion, i consider a lot of things beautiful... for one, i think wordsworth poems are beautiful, the vivid descriptions of nature and its subtle intricacies... then, counter strike is beautiful... i could stay tuned for about 23 hours a day without getting tired of it... some people i find beautiful... (I'm not mentioning anyone from class, I'd be screwed by the controversy) my math teacher from 5th std was beautiful ( I mean the way she taught, not the looks, btw she was 54yrs old when I was in my 5th)... and coming to the more subtle things, the babble of a newborn baby is beautiful, the smile of a child is beautiful, as i mentioned previously, the anxious look on the face of an expectant lover, the serene beauty of a forest at night, the calmness of the sea(in retrospection, the sea looks disgusting, after the Jan 12th event), the splatter of rain against the window panes, the glow on the faces of a newly wed couple, the bewildered look of a child as he/she first goes to school, all these are beautiful...

P.S: OMG, what a post... never thought I'd write about something as abstract as this... it came as a passing thought in class when i was musing in gayathri mam's hour(:P i'd rather not mention what I'm thinking right now)... and materialized at about 12.30 in the night, when I could find nothing better to do...