Appearance not substance

I do not want to see the skyline. I want to know how the

background looks with me as the subject. It is all about me,

myself and I.

From a group of people who thought that peeking into a mirror was looking at the devil itself and that posing in front of a camera would drain a person's soul, we have come a long way. Our generation is easily the one that has the most access to how they look. Rather than posturing at their better side, they seem to want to see every angle of the body. They yearn to have the perfect photo-friendly display of the best that they have to offer. They want to be forever in portrait mode. Every passing moment is a potential Instagram moment, and they must be ready. They do not want to be caught in an awkward pose, opening the mouth too wide, with the hair unkempt or even with a face incongruent to the camera's angle.

Their every second of their existence must be an 'insta' worthy moment!

Don't even preach that inner beauty is more important and that one has to be beautiful on the inside or that beauty is skin deep. It is easier to make a conclusion by perusing the outside. Exploring inner attraction is too tiring and cumbersome.

These are some of the thoughts that went through my mind as I witnessed a few events recently. Two of them were life-altering academic achievements, while the other was festival merriment. It seems to me that well-wishers who attended the function were there to sort of mark their attendance by pixellating their presence forever. Whether they were there to genuinely extend their felicitations is another question. Their preoccupation was to take pictures of the host in different combinations of friends and relatives like in a round-robin football match to pick out the team with the most goals. In this case, the person who appears most photogenic. Do they not realise that saying that one is photogenic means that he or she is ugly in real life but deceptively appealing in pictures.

Amma used to say, "This world is about appearance, not substance. But with time, beauty will decay, but the matter will withstand the test of time."

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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