What is Beauty ?

A beautiful poem, piece of writing, painting, music or a movie takes one into an esoteric experience. Something which is almost always cannot be described verbally rather into the world of cognition. I always wanted to think that beautiful is universal, at the least to mankind. Over the years I found out that it is not the case, it is only universal when everybody has similar sensibility and value system, as in today’s globalized world. Imagine a few hundred years ago , in a not so globalized world , the practice of having a ‘small’ feet for Chinese women or extreme long necks on Burmese women or etching scales on ones’ body in Papa New Guinea was considered to be beautiful but to the rest of the world it is not. To the world , it is not even disgusting; there is complete nonchalance, no extreme emotions. Why is that? Did it not reflect a unique combination of proportion, scale, balance, symmetry and rhythm? Maybe or maybe not? However one thing was certainly different, the concept of belief in a particular world view, thus the associated morality, sense of purpose of life and so on.  This is the basis generating the perception of beauty. ‘Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder’ as they say

There is no universal beauty. It is culture, world view specific. If that is the case all the taxonomy in Aristotles ‘Poetics’  do not apply. Aristotle as such did not develop a theory of esthetics in the sense BharatMuni’s NatyaSashtra did, through the idea asserting “that entertainment is a desired effect of performance arts but not the primary goal, and that the primary goal is to transport the individual in the audience into another parallel reality, full of wonder, where he experiences the essence of his own consciousness, and reflects on spiritual and moral questions “. While I would not agree with the “reflects on spiritual and moral questions” as I believe that these are cognitive factors which in the first place drive the creation of the parallel reality and experience itself.

I believe that anything beautiful is a slice of life itself , slicing dimension maybe time, space or our consciousness. It is the reality that brings for the Baharatmuni’s Bhavas ( emotions) and subsequently the rasa( sentiments). Emotion is the instrument of action, an action which instills sentiment in the motions of sliced reality. This notion of process of slicing the reality is a very deep intellectual process as Anand Coomaraswamy ( 1877-1947) put it “ it is not by sensibilities but by his intellect that a man can be called an artist”.

So when Tagore writes his poem or Ganesh Pyne and Da Vinci does his painting or Satyajit Ray creates his cinema they are all slicing chunks of reality but with a twist. The twist is their own intellectual understanding of the reality and what do they want to communicate through it. Hoping to transform the recipients of the art through an experience to what they felt or thought.  Art is just the expression , beauty is the objective , the experience. It is not necessarily noble, pleasurable but should always be able to bring extreme emotions (bhavas) and rasas . You can either love it or hate it but will not be able to ignore it. If an work created as art can be ignored, then it is not a work of art but just another banal expression .

It is for this reason, certain works of propaganda are works of art, created to promote a particular political cause or point of view. There is always a truth in beauty, not the truth of the factual reality of the time but deep introspection of the existence of primeval human emotion and also the fact that without emotion, be it positive or negative, there is no life.

With globalization the world view is changing or more appropriately the world view is converging. In this way , slowly all over mankind a universal sense of morality, an acceptance of only way of life is becoming the norm, thus the sense of what is beautiful. In this ecosystem the idea of beautiful women or a painting or music becomes global. Since everyone will agree, a theory can be created, rules can be set and finally everything can be produced from a formal framework.  Do we, as a human being want to live in this world by drowning diversity and celebrating monolithic human attitudes is another question?

Personally I would like to live in the world where, if ever I could I would like to go in the far corners of the world and see completely different things emerging out of human ingenuity. Whether they are beautiful to me it doesn’t matter, what matters most is that they are genuinely different arising out of completely different value system. That would take me to in Bharatmunis words “to another parallel reality, full of wonder” and help me to experience the God within me .

Do God Exist ?

I always remember this high school physics thought experiment. Imagine a dog who only lives in a two dimensional world , that is he cannot perceive the third dimension. What happens to him when someone drops a bone from the top of his head , the third dimension. ? He sees the bone as it lands in his world of the two dimensions, but he is unable to comprehend from where the bone came from. This is because he has no idea of the existence of another dimension , the third dimension.

In human life , in our society many things happen for which we do not have a rational explanation, so we attribute them either to luck or to some external force ( like GOD).  Thus is an existence of something beyond us which we cannot control, do not know how it operates but do exists. Over time , as our mankind’s collective wisdom increase we can explain one phenomenon but still others exists which we cannot rationalize. In ancient times we did not know water cycle and rain, so Rain god existed but today we can create artificial rain ourselves so the necessity of Rain God reduced.

Will it be ever possible to explain why something happen and something do not ? Why there is stock market crash? Why a particular individual won a lottery? And so on. We still do not understand gravitational force and just became aware of a new matter called dark matter. It is for this, and these entire unexplainable phenomenon’s God exists.

 God also exist because hope exists. Hope is the elixir of life without it no life can exist. The idea of procreation is a simple but a fundamental manifestation of hope in life. It exists as the only reason to live in an extreme scenario when one is powerless against a much superior force. Imagine a feudal lord raping your wife and daughter, castrating your son and making you work to death. It is only in the belief in hope that someday (depending whatever your religion is) God will punish the perpetrator or you will reborn again for your redemption against the lord, that you will live. Why will somebody dig his own grave at gunpoint then shot and buried in it, without an iota of hope?

The argument whether God exists or do not exist doesn’t matter. It always exists, because it is antithesis of human fragility.  Whatever we cannot do, wish to do or hope to do can be done by omnipotent God, thus it is real and subsists in our mind and continues to live and grow in our common human consciousness. Like the concept of infinity, God exists without any bounds, endless but very natural.

Is there a reality which exists beyond us or is it that we just create a new realities with our thought, as our brain evolves? Is there a truth, one universal truth for everything and that is God ? Can we rationalize that if there exists one universal truth then there will one universal law which will lead to that truth? These and other similar questions can lead us to hundreds of arguments and thousands of pages of intellectual thesis. The very fact that we are thinking all these, says that we are alive, and yes, we hope to answer them one day and create new ones, like God.

God exists because we exists, it is like the ability to breathe as soon as we are born , so do the idea of God takes form in our mind. Like the concept of unidirectional flow of time that naturally occurs to us, so is God effortlessly building in us with the notion of hope. It is a necessity, part of our existence in our world , it is what we are and for that reason only, logical analysis for the existence God is ridden with sometimes contradictory, incomprehensible fallacies. It exists because the concept of ‘belief/faith’ lives as an evidence of our senses to be meaningful. We believe in God , not consciously but subconsciously like our breath, we cannot do otherwise.

The idea of God as an absolute truth is incorrect. It is not , God is just a natural phenomenon , a concept of feeling, like love, hope, despair, pain  existing in every human mind. Everybody is born with it. In this way God has no conflict with the natural sciences or to say evolution. While we tend to expand God to explain everything , including evolution, which as a scientific endeavor do give rational explanation of  many phenomenon and thus the idea of  ‘belief’ along with God can step back and let the concepts thrive. We need to remember that in science the hypothesis are approximation can only be made more plausible but cannot be proven to be true. A good hypothesis can be readily proven false.

That which cannot be explained rationally is accepted as belief attributed to God. It can either be a manifestation of God as classical Vedic thought might lead to us belief or some action of God which the religions from the Middle East (Christianity, Islam et all) might lead us to think.

A taste for Recorded Music…..

I am one of those person who was born into recorded music. In 1960’s onwards recorded music completely took over human society, worldwide, making millionaires out of artists.  My first introduction to music was through recorded LP’s of Lata Mangeshkar  and Hemant Kumar , popular  singers in those years and probably greatest ever.  Over the years I have listened to many types of music from all over the world , from tunes of Indonesia to pipes of Inca’s , US rock and roll to Indian classical music . You name it, but they were always recorded. At first during my childhood it was the record player’s with LP’s having beautifully designed covers and woody tonal quality of the emanated sound , then the tape recorders with cassettes and now crystal clear ethereal sounding CD’s and digital music.  I don’t remember ever listening to live music, I mean music straight from the instruments or voice to my ears.

Recorded music is always perfect, designed with deliberation and carry across the message as it is intended by the artist. It is not a living thing, no loose structure, improvisation of the moment or errors exposing human fragility. It is always impeccable with predefined sound vibrations and tonal patterns that always reliably affected my consciousness.  So when I close my eyes, sometimes, my head fill-up with the tunes that I have listened to over and over again either by choice or forcibly. India , in particular Kolkta where I grew up , on every conceivable occasion be it local club soccer tournament or Pujo it was always a necessity to broadcast music over a contraption popularly called ‘mike’ . In the process you were forced to listen to the latest popular numbers. I liked them. I liked them all and absorbed them into my soul without any apprehension. Not only that, I wanted more and went on to collect tunes, different tunes, varied tunes which I gathered, listened and soaked in them. It was the love.

My love for music, a love which was always transmitted and consumed through a machine. As the songs and tunes soared through my heart lifting me, taking me across in long flights of pure imagination and emotion, I never once thought of wanting to meet the singer or musician. Is it that I did not want to include the producer of the music in my very personal precious experience, which itself I wanted to memorize in my mind forever? So now, after many years, when I listen to certain tunes I hark back to those lonely teen days where sitting on rooftop, under afternoon shade, I would lie back, listening to music, shutting my eyes and feel the warm breeze of summer holidays under my nose.

I know it is just that. Is it just that? Yes it is personal very personal. Like the process of rumination over words before writing them down on pieces of paper as poems.

Growing up in lower middleclass of Kolkata , live music that I could ever afford was also not direct. Singers propped up on makeshift stages or stadiums singing through big speakers,  that was the music, performed in front of us. It was not just music but the people, the surroundings, the atmosphere, the musicians response to his audience, everything. We listened to the whole lot including the sound of the space in which all these was happening. An experience, different one, but not music. I abhorred those concerts.

I always thought, how it will feel to sit in front of Ghulam Ali and listen to him singing the gazals directly to me or have Sandhya Mukhopadhyay lift me up with her lilting voice. I wanted to listen to their songs directly, in full form, three dimensional sounds, surrounding my head and ears and extend my fingers to touch their soul. Merge my soul in their taste, smell, feelings, tunes. That would have been true love transmitted between us and without the machine.

That I could not afford. Till then recorded music stays, intermingled with my life’s small things as the very personal fragrance of my soul. So more realistic and warm the recordings are, better it is.