The nurse holds out the baby to its proud parents and exclaims, “Oh! What a beautiful child. Just look at those big beautiful eyes.” Parents become happy. Relatives give a look of satisfaction. But come on! You can barely see a newborn’s eyes. And so, defying all logic, the child learns his first lesson: Big eyes are beautiful. And the line choruses from the mouths of aunties, grandpas, neighbors and cousins until the idea gets so deep-rooted in the child that after he grows up, he too joins in the chorus.
The next lesson on the “socially-defined” beauty comes to the child in the form of its attires. As pre-determined for ages, pink is supposed to look good on girls and blue on boys. And the colors become so connected with the genders that girls, by norm, are expected to love pink and boys to hate it. So much does this color-consciousness gets its hold on young minds that most males (even after they grow up) would not even want to be caught dead in pink apparels. And, thus, the stereotype overpowers the individual, once again.
And then, as the child is growing up, the society determines his/her beauty by the amount of fat in his/her body. Okay, I agree that kids shouldn’t be skinny and that it’s great to have them on the chubbier side. But please, it’s not okay to make them enormous just because we believe in “the more, the better”. Even kids need to have a balanced diet and a healthy, fit (please do not read that as fat) body.
When the child becomes an adolescent, the society simply reverses the idea of beauty and a new stereotype gains roots in the minds of these youngsters. A stereotype which leaves many of them anorexic, malnourished and skeletal. Yes, you got it, the much hyped size-zero! Why, in heaven’s name, can we not associate being healthy and beautiful with having a normal healthy body? Why do we want to swing from one extreme to the other? Or, (if I were to put it more aptly), why can’t the society accept something or somebody the way they are, instead of trying to judge them by their “supposed” idea of beauty?
And this delimitation of “beautiful or not beautiful” does not end with humans. Take, for instance, the fact that I like the sound of crows crowing (I am not just writing this to prove my point here. I genuinely do!). But, when I put across this view, I am more often than not laughed at and ridiculed. Why? Because according to the norms of the society, a crow is supposed to bring bad luck and hence “everyone” is supposed to consider it “ugly” and perceive its sound as “annoying”. Give me a break!
Certain sounds that please my ears may not please somebody else’s. And vice versa. Isn’t that exactly why people listen to different genres of music? How then can a person’s perception be ridiculed in any way? And how can the society determine what should look, taste, smell, appear or feel good to an individual?
Even identical twins have different choices. Why, then, does the society have a defined view of beauty? Why does a “handsome” man inevitably need to be muscular and bold, and a “pretty” lady fair and slim? Why should pink invariably be for girls and not for boys?
The variation that each individual and each thing upholds is the very reason why life is so exquisite. And it is because of the contribution of all these variations – the fairs as well as the not-so-fairs, the colorfuls as well as the single shades, the pinks as well as the blues, the slims as well as the chubbies and, finally, the large-eyed as well as the chinkies – that living is so delightful. Because of this reason, each one of us is a beautiful being in our own unique respects. And the decision of what an individual finds more beautiful and what less (if it needs to be made) should be left to the individual and not imposed upon by society.
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