Beauty

'Beauty is nothing but the start of terror we can hardly bear
And we adore it because of the serene scorn it could kill us with...'
- Rilke


I never cease to be awed by the innumerable puzzles around and beyond, yet to be solved... and the innumerable simplicities in everyday life, common, unnoticed, yet so amazing. I sit in a park nearby and keep staring at the trees, clouds, birds. I realize how precise and perfect the symmetries in nature are, precariously balanced and yet so brilliantly strong. 

I feed a cow and look into her eyes. I lose myself in them. Such depth and kindness. I hold a dying dog in my arms and weep, knowing that I can do nothing for him. And he looks at me so peacefully... as if he knows that the end, death is inevitable, unavoidable. It is so hard to lose. Yet there's something so terribly beautiful about the lessons that people and lives around you teach after they leave.
It is so easy to criticise, isn't it? But it never gives one the inner satisfaction that one may get by growing a positive thought and building on it in one's mind. Beauty is in art, the weed we step on while running carefree worrying not for once about where we'd reach, dew drops on flowers, the ladybird, a slow blur of color, which flies around and sits on a palm, the tiny sparrow pecking at anything, the lizard walking upside down on the ceiling, the cellphone, android, satellites, skyscrapers, mud huts, villages with the greenery soothing the eyes, a metro city turning dreams into reality, a pair of pajamas I picked up from Sarojini, a bag from Zara I spent my month's pocket money on, amazing food, the determination to fast for a day... a toothless grin a beggar kid gave me when I took him to a shop, bought him food and he demanded extra ketchup on his sandwich, Nafisa Ali casually resting against her car in Khan Market, the Mughal buildings, well planned middle class suburban houses... and I could go on. Not in any way similar, beautiful as ever.
There are endless things that evoke wonder in my mind and heart, but then comes reality hitting me hard. The deep politics, violence, undefined relations involved in forming, shaping all the beauty we see around us disillusions me... nihilism clouds my life and I start questioning the point of doing or being anything. 'Anything you do in life will be insignificant, but it is still essential that you do it.' But why? 

Why is it so difficult to go through a single, simple path, planning life and going about it without any doubts? I envy such people who do! Or maybe, I never knew them enough.

Sartre did say that it is very difficult to capture one's essence for the moment one thinks one has, at that instant itself one will have changed. Man is a process, not an entity. Everything in this world is so incomprehensible and difficult to be at peace with. The only path that will save one from drowning will be science for it is the only truth, but now that I question every single thing on this planet... is it really the ultimate truth or like any other thing, an extremely cleverly manipulated reality?