Beauty Will Save The World- The Pursuit of Beauty & Truth.

Let’s take a flower. Any flower. Take a close look at it. You may see a pattern of well-arranged symmetrical petals. Go even further, and you will see the parts of the flower formed in a certain way. A microscopic view gets you to a whole new pattern. Going down even further would reveal a pattern of a different kind. It goes on until it is indivisible. At the macroscopic level of a flower, it seems like a simple, beautiful flower. Only on inquiry does the flower reveal the complications of its beauty. Objectively, the beauty of a flower does not mean anything, but it’s the subjective inquiry towards something, the pursual, that reveals the ultimate truth. It’s the subjective pursual of beauty, the truth of the matter, that ends up forming the objectivity of the flower- The Ultimate Truth if you will. Take the same analogy and apply it to any aspect of your life, knowingly or unknowingly it will point you to the ultimate truth.

Growing up, I was in awe of those who could perform on stage—the singers, the dancers, the orators, anyone and everyone who could trigger an emotion from within, would flatter me, and the next thing I knew, I would look them up in a heroic sense. It was a panache to watch them doing what they enjoy doing. In a way, I felt happy that I had cool friends to hang out with, but deep down I’d feel the sense of not having the talent, or being able to perform on stage, because, you know, performing on stage means having the courage to open up to the environment you are in and perform without inhibitions.

One fine day, when I was 10 years old, there was a call for a singing competition. I had basic training in classical music and was fluent in a couple of songs, not knowing that I sounded terrible to the ears of those listening. So, I mustered up all my courage and enrolled my name in the competition. On the day of the competition, I vividly remember my friends cheering for me, but deep down I felt my nerves breaking down. T minus 2 singers, is my turn. Every other student was killing it and was getting applause. Though it was pre-meditated that I was going to sing a particular song, the moment my name was called, my palms were sweaty, I was frightened to look at that large a crowd, I could hear my breath thundering through my mind, and everything that I had pre-meditated vanished, only to find myself singing a song that I had barely practiced and that I only knew 2 lines of. I repeated the same lines a couple of times and somehow finished it. I could hear a clap coming from behind, I’d still like to believe it to be from my crush. I still do. The walk from the stage to my seat was one of the most embarrassing walks I can think of. Later, my friends laughed at me for what had happened on stage. Five years later, I was in a similar situation, performing a play on stage in front of a larger audience, but this time I forgot my lines. The silence of not knowing what to perform is still frightening. Again, by the end of it, I was embarrassed by what had happened.

As time went by, slowly, I gravitated towards writing (poetry/stories), filmmaking, and exploring visual storytelling. Every time I wrote a piece of poem, an explicable rush flowed through my body, and every time I recited back to the crowd, it rendered applause. Every time I narrated a story I had written; it rendered a sense of excitement in the eyes of the person listening to it. Every time I showed a footage/photograph I captured it rendered a sense of truth in their eyes, that I truly felt within myself. Slowly, but steadily, I started understanding the importance of pursual of something that you truly look up to. To me, it was performing arts, it was capturing the beauty, it was the ability to articulate the experience that brings you closer to the truth, it was and is, the pursual of beauty that fascinates me.

Like the example of the flower I gave, as you explore the layers of your inner quests, the beauty will reveal itself to the truth in layers as you pursue it- that you and you alone can experience. Heck, I am convinced that beauty is truth and truth is beautiful, only differs in the degree of experience and that the pursuit of beauty will always save the world, first subjectively- your world, then objectively- the world around you. Hence, surrounding yourself with beauty, literally and figuratively, will make your life intensely beautiful. I no longer feel insecure when I see people performing on stage, because, in a way, I am performing, pursuing, my sense of truth and beauty that I am truly proud of.