THE BEAUTY OF MITHI RIVER


















“Beauty is truth's smile when she beholds her own face
in a perfect mirror.”

- Rabindranath Tagore

In life, just as we tend to hear what we want to hear, we tend to see, too, what we want to see. This happens all the time, everywhere, for all of us. That’s the main reason why I get inspired to blog every day… on very mundane things, which mostly escape our attention. I call them the wayside flowers. Frankly, there is extraordinary beauty in these wild ordinary flowers…

If only we pause to ‘see’ their extraordinary beauty!

The innocence of little babies and pets, for example, needs our tender eyes to rejoice over. Similarly, the untimely death of a beloved one and the horrific devastation due to an earthquake or hurricane – yes, no matter how harrowing the experience may be - they need an equally awe-struck eyes to behold them. Likewise, cruelly and heartlessness around us can crush us… but, they do contain a sublime strength to free us from suffering…

The rain and the rainbow, the bright sky and a moonless night can be equally inspiring… The marriage and the divorce, the friendship and the betrayal… the success and the failure… yes, in all of them is hidden a beauty of special kind…

How God appears to most of us when we are brought on our knees!

Bad times are equally life-enriching as our good times… There is no waste in life… nothing unimportant. As the sixteen-year-old Gitanjali wrote in one of her bedside scribblings (call them Poems, if you wish) when she was dying of cancer, “Nothing is unimportant in life… Not even death!”

Dr. Victor Frankl, lost his entire family to the horrors of Nazi brutality in the Concentration Camps… but, somehow, he survived… and was destined to distill for us the ‘beauty’ concealed in such brutality. He did it through his powerful book, ‘Man’s search for Meaning’…

Searching for meaning when life seems so harsh and hopeless… so meaningless?

Yes sir, that ‘is’ the beauty of life!

Beauty shall, always, lie in the eyes of the beholder! The inner eyes will be more important for this than the outer eyes!

Two days ago, Dr. Lohit, a dear friend of mine, posted a picture on FB. (See above). “You can find beauty in mundane places,” he wrote, “This is Kurla, near Mithi nullah... the dirtiest place on earth!”






To me, the Mithi River is just a metaphor… We need it to keep reminding us about the ‘beauty’ of Life!

GERALD D’CUNHA

Pic.: Main pic (birds) - Dr. Lohitaksha Suratkal / Other images - Internet


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