Beauty and the Beast

How many times we have read the stories of beautiful princesses, ladies with magnificent beauty or a beautiful damsel in distress? Beauty has always been glorified to such an extent that it often overshadows any virtues that mankind may possess. All these overhype about beauty that I have been hearing since my childhood, left me wondering that what it would be like to live in a world that does not have a differentiation line dividing mankind based on their look?

It’s not that I am not enamored by the magnificence of the beauty. Story of Cinderella, Snow White and multiple other beautiful princesses has nonetheless dazzled me. It was a general accepted idea that any uncle or brother should have a beautiful wife. A simmering blindfold made up by millions of stories, movies and social heresy is on eyes of each of us that dazzles us to a divine effect of beauty. The effect of that blindfold has been wearing off for some time (For me) and in the process it has led me to realize the ugly truth behind the notion of beauty. Suddenly my mind has started hitting me with questions about the logic of the rules of this illogical world.

Why beauty is important? Why a beautiful person should be credited with extra merit that might tower all other merits. A person does not choose their look, they are just born with it. Why such a quality on which mankind has no control should be the dominating factor. We do not choose the way we look, and don’t earn our look too then why should be we rewarded/punished for something we never worked for.  

You might argue that talent count too. Nobody would like a silly and beautiful person. But that just an empty argument. We all know that the effort a simple looking person has to put to make an effect on society and how easy it comes to an attractive person. And what about “made-in-Heaven” marriages? This “so called” holy and life size decision is made purely based on look. “Looking for a fair, beautiful/Handsome Bride/Groom”, who want a non-fair and ugly one?

To a certain extent our professional life has come to be defined by our merit (though so called beautiful person still has some edge, which of course is regardless of their merit), our personal and social life is still largely defined by the way we look. Men kind has always tried to eliminate variable from their life. We have always tried to write our destiny since the time memorial. But why we have failed to eliminate the biggest variable from our life – “Our Look” – on which we have no control. If we closely look at this issue then we can narrow this problem down to the one half of the humanity. While the one half – male – has been able to successfully elevate their merit upon their look (not completely though), the other half – Female – is still being perished under the tight shackle of beautiness. Looking beautiful has been the prime motive of female since the time immemorial and this convention is only growing stronger. I often see parents brimming with pride on their beautiful daughter, as though she has won the biggest crown purely on her merit. Has she?

The chain of beauty has been throttling us, slowly and gradually sipping the life out of us. What worry you have in your life if you are a fair maiden, and how treacherous the life path is for a simple girl and that’s just because of an accident, an accident called “Gene”. The curse of beauty has been made permanent on the femalekind by trillion dollars of “Beauty” industry. All you have to do is look pretty to stand out in this world.  If you do not pass the eligibility criteria then don’t worry our trillion dollar industry is working hard to elevate you to that position, which has nevertheless been defined by them.

The biggest culprit are our art and literature. Why god/goddess, heroes/heroines etc are portrayed as beautiful and villain as ugly? Why a good person is to be beautiful and bad person to be ugly? Who defines the criteria of beauty? We have talked about discrimination based on caste, race, religion, gender, class etc. Why have we not yet added the discrimination criteria of “look”, which is the most prevalent form of discrimination all over the world? I guess we don’t have answer for that. We might achieve gender disparity in next 1000 years but we still wouldn’t dare to speak against “Look Disparity”. Ours is a society of hypocrites and we would continue to be hypocrite. The real tragedy is that, now I wish that blindfold is tightened on my eyes again so that I do get the courage of living in the world of hypocrites.