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Beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder

Yeah, I know, clichéd saying, coined probably by ugly ducklings who wish that they could change to swans. No, I am not going to exalt this statement, but I am merely planning to express some of my views on the same.

I had earlier written a post on us trying to find meaning in everything. I shall resume from where I left off, and try to show how the jumbled, twisted and convoluted skein of thought links these two posts.

I resume at the interactions in my literature class. I have since completed that course, and moved on to another course which far surpasses the previous one in the qualities of the same. This course tries hard to hammer into the students some examples of good literature, which the students are required to accept as good literature. While I myself have no keen reasons to be a radical and debunk the canon, I think that it is unfair to actually point out what is good and what's not.

Why, you ask. Very well, I shall tell. I go back to the highly clichéd title of this post. Everyone has slightly different aesthetic senses, and it would be cruel, almost inhuman to destroy that individuality. We are not machines or products on a conveyor belt assembly line in a factory, but human beings, yet, our current system of education simply wishes to prepare us for industry, and does so with a practical demonstration of an assembly line.

Recently, I decided to increase the means of wasting my time on the internet. Clearly, Google Reader was not a sufficient waste of time. Suddenly, I have decided to fancy myself as a photographer with a highly developed aesthetic sense (only in my version of reality though), and I have started following good photographers like Trey Ratcliff, Jay Patel, Varina Patel, Darren Rowse, Lisa Bettany and other-not-so-good-people. However, others clearly think them as good. (I don't want to risk making enemies with people, so I don't name the not-so-good, and definitely not the not-at-all-good.) But why do I mention these photographers? Just to drive home the point that my version of aesthetic beauty does not necessarily comply with the notions that others may have. But this does not mean that I need to change my notions of what is good and what-is-not simply because someone thinks I should.

Which brings me to the other point I wanted to raise. Am I a good photographer? I think I am. I make all my photographs faded, vignette, with poor colours and noisy. Now that's beautiful photography. If you don't agree, you don't belong to my world, and I have nothingtodowithyou! All the good photographs from masters of yesteryear have some common characteristics. They are either black and white, or have distorted colours. They show characteristics of vignetting. They have a lot of noise on the image. Conclusion: Any photograph with these characteristics has to be a good photograph.

Of course, there are some who are not fooled by this notion of the canon, and demand real beauty. Have a look at this link, and this one and this one.

Again, isn't it funny that when Salman Rushdie writes like this only, complyetely debunking language grammar logic and god-knows-what-not that people appreciate it and give him the booker but a writer who nos no angrezi is never even so much as looked at? Why this injustice. I think that there is a foreign hand or a hand of the opposition in this. There is no other way that a prolific and talented writer like myself is still struggling with only 4000odd pageviews on my blog, and not even a wellwritten comment and someone with a hand(or a pointing finger) in him wins the bookerofthebooker. And how does that Bhagat person even figure in the equation? What has he done, but to take two clichéd success strategies, one being IIT, and the other which I wish to not name, and make a clichéd operation of multiplication on the two?

Appreciate my talents or go in the oven and die

As I preview this post, I am shocked and surprised at my ability to write a terrible post.

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