Wikipedia describes beauty as a characteristic of a person, place, object or idea that provides a perceptual feeling of pleasure, meaning or satisfaction. Beauty is an abstract concept, and therefore, is bound to mean different things to different people. To a mathematician, an elegant proof, or to a software engineer, an elegant code, can be as beautiful as Mona Lisa. Also, different people have different ideas about what they find beautiful, for instance, to me, Dev D was a beautiful film, but for some of my best friends, it was a crass, gritty update of a classic, and the ruining of a romantic archetype that casts its shadow over Indian Cinema and Psyche. It’s a fact that different people have different standards and look for different things. Given this, is it any surprise that the idea of beauty, or for the purpose of this blog, ‘inner beauty’, means so many different things to different people.
In my childhood, I had heard time and again from preachy movies, songs and TV soaps, that real beauty is within, that it does not require make up or fancy clothes, that real beauty is skin deep, and all the female protagonist has to do to get the hero is be a good person, and eventually, the shallow lipstick wearing and cigarette smoking vamp would let go of the hero, or the hero would find her cigarette smoking utterly reprehensible and he would come to the Plain Jane heroine and the movie will end with an appropriate happily ever after. On a certain level, it does make sense that the story would take this turn. We all love rooting for the underdog, and the woman who puts hours of effort into her appearance and deportment is obviously a shallow and conniving hussy who is unworthy of our support. Plus, she smokes cigarettes, and that means she is pure evil. Therefore, we should all root for the simple girl next door whose redeeming qualities include a) being a fundamentally good person b) does not care about her looks because she is beautiful inside and c) is usually played by an actress who looks stunning even without make up.
This, of course, caused a severe dissonance when I became a young man and started observing and appreciating female beauty. Most of the girls, if not all, would put some effort into their looks and appearances. While my childhood conditioning made me search desperately and without success for a girl who eschewed the concept of applies beauty altogether, another part of me was pleasantly surprised by the fact that the girls around were putting in conscious efforts to appear easy to the eye. It could just be a case of my male gaze bias, but most of the times, I got the feeling that these girls did not consider the use of artificial beautification a crime, and the world was a better place for it. Now, granted that not all of them were as beautiful as the super hot actresses in the movies who did not wear make up, but these girls did make the effort to make themselves attractive, to make themselves beautiful, and they were beautiful because of it. They weren’t beautiful because they wore fashionable dresses, but they were beautiful because they tried to better themselves in a certain way through hard work.
Now, this might sound shallow on my part, that I appreciated the people around me solely on their physical appearances and not on the kind of person they were on the inside, and I disagree with that. I’d argue that real beauty does come from within, but in its strictest and narrowest sense, it manifests itself in the physical appearance of the person. I would argue that true inner beauty comes from a desire to be attractive, to be beautiful, not just to the outside world, but to one’s own self as well, and that includes a desire to appear pleasing to one’s own self. When a person is strong, confident and beautiful on the inside, they invariably try and make themselves appear more pleasing, not out of their own vanity, but because they want to appear pleasing to themselves. It comes from a universal desire to better yourself, to uplift yourself that all of us have, and which manifests itself stronger in some of us than the rest. These are the people who better themselves both physically, mentally and emotionally through their own will and drive for excellence, and these are the people who exhibit true inner beauty, even in their external appearances. True inner beauty is not about looking pretty without wearing make up etc. A person who looks good effortlessly is a person who just won big time at the genetic lottery, but a person who takes the effort to look good, well, hats off to them.
Coco Chanel once famously said that fashion fades, while style remains the same throughout the ages. Fashion is the outer beauty, the dresses and the makeup and the grooming and the hair-styling, while style is something that we carry within, the inner beauty that makes us who we are, no matter what we wear. Mother Teresa was beautiful, not just because she had a good heart and she worked tirelessly for the needy, but because her calmness and serenity was an aura that she carried with herself, in her walk, in her voice and in her clothes. She who took great care of other who could not fend for themselves, took great care of herself as well. Nietzsche argued that we lived in a nihilistic world, a world where reality was unkind, and that the strongest rose from amongst us on the strength of their wills, and that applies to all aspects of the human experience, including beauty. We live in an ugly, horrendous world, and people make themselves beautiful by their hard work. A person might be born with a pretty face, but he or she will attain true inner beauty only if they work on it. True inner beauty comes with hard work and great willpower and a hunger to better yourself. A person who is not born as a model or a hunk, but still tries to better themselves is a beautiful person, and appreciating a person’s effort to better themselves never made someone shallow.
Net, I’m not shallow, and girls who take the effort to make themselves look good, on behalf of all the men, we appreciate you. In the movies, you might be the vamps, but in real life, we salute you.
Good stuff!
ReplyDeletecheers! :)