3) Happiness and Aesthetics

We all have our own tastes and interests. The wonderful reward of nature is our understanding and appreciation of the abstract yet measurable, invisible yet apparent, individual yet universal and complex yet simple - aesthetic appeal. Aesthetics is very close to art, it encompasses all those phenomena that appeal to our senses, based on various criteria, including moral, ethical and intellectual.

I love music, can't live without it. I love violin, enjoy piano, bob my head to the guitar, tap my feet to the beat of the drums, hum to the tune of the flute... Oh I love music! And i dont think there would be anyone who wouldn't appreciate music... it makes the chaotic world come alive! Those who have access to the latest edition of Reader's Digest, should check out the March 2007 copy... it has a story titled 'The night I met Einstein'. It shows how crazy Einstein was about music... (Einstein had said if he weren't a scientist, he would be a violonist.) Gandhi loved 'Vaishnava Jan To...". Music touches the strings of the heart, maybe that is why we sing in the spiritual places...

Apart from music, there is literature. Oh, without the wonderful books, novels, newspapers and magazines, how empty our lives would have been! Can you imagine your childhood days without Alice in Wonderland, without Lord of the Rings, without Huckleberry Finn & Tom Sawyer, without Sherlock Holmes?! From the holy scriptures to the seemingly absurd fiction, literature has captured the interest of every literate person. Even today, I would love to sit down, turn some music on, and read away a good book to glory... So the next time you plan to get me a gift, I would prefer a good book :-) (God bless Harry Potter... )

I dont know much about it, but I suppose the art of painting, dancing, etc. would have a charm of their own. But one thing I can talk lots is about sports! I have played ping pong for a long time, and I certainly know, once you play the game you love, you forget everything in the world, including hunger! Sports are not just about having a good time. I am sure those hooked on to the computer games would bet their money's worth when I say that sports can be addictive! (When I was 14, I braved the biting December chill at 6 AM in the morning, to have a few shots at my ping pong table.) I hope they make play-time a compulsory thing in school. What is achieved by making a young child sit in a room whole day long? He will most probably do that in his not-so-young days anyway..

Coming to the moral and ethical side of it, every person on this earth, except those with crazy brain conditions, have their own personal sense of 'right' and 'wrong'. These are driven by the holy scriptures, by our own belief systems... we all create our own boundaries and rules, and stick to them. This gives us the sense of 'correctness', that relief of living life without a sense of guilt. Can you imagine living a life you don't approve of? The people addicted to wrong stuff would know how horrible the life would be. A quote from the movie Million Dollar Baby sums it up - "Frankie, I've seen you at Mass almost every day for 23 years. The only person who comes to church that much is the kind who can't forgive himself for something. " Maybe the validity and genuineness of what is 'right' and 'wrong' could be the subject of another discussion. There are just so many sides to it, and it so relative.

Finally, intellectual side of aesthetics, and my favorite part of this blog. We know that the brain is the most complex thing in the world, and I love the brain for it. We all talk about our 'hearts' and 'feelings', but the real culprit is the brain! To quote an example, there was a time few months back, when I was asked to analyse some code written by a colleague. It was very complex and it took me almost two days to understand the way in which it was written, and was supposed to be looked at. When I finally 'got it', I just couldnt help but go and congratulate the colleague who had originally written it, and my words were 'Hey, great job in writing the code. It is beautiful!' And the good part about intellectual debates is the fact that there ARE few basic ground rules, which all us understand, and they are based on logic. For a code, the simple rules are the code should be clean and simple, it should be delivered on time, it should satisfy all the requirements, it should be user friendly and should cover all dangerous areas, and of course, few code-specific rules.

There would be similar rules for politics, business, technological institutes, etc. (The first thing that might come to mind is that these rules probably stay in books, or in blogs, what happens is just an aberration to all these.. But well, this blog is meant for the readers to arrive on common grounds of this subject, this is just a reinforcement of the basic tenets of truth that lay the foundation of the human civilization. Maybe if we talk and think about this more, it will drill down deeper into our day-to-day lives...

Well, have a 'beautiful' week ahead everyone!

Next week, the penultimate part of this blog-series... Happiness and Truth.