A THING OF BEAUTY

Memory tags: On buying my first pair of diamond earings.

Over an early dinner we watch on television the pyramids of Egypt being built, adding piquancy, to a simple but delightful meal. The lengthening shadows on the sands say its time for the slaves to stop work. The painter adds the last stroke on the pharaohs’ face and surrenders his brush and pots of paint to the supervisor. Only a modern metal detector is missing in the security check before he leaves. Death to those who betray the secrets of the pharaohs! On his return, the family watches him unfold a toy he has managed to sneak out. A doll in delightful green and gold is held up to his young child. How can the toys his father made belong to the dead pharaoh? Before the child can touch it, it is wrapped up and put away with other similar artifacts in a beautiful box. Maybe these trinkets will help him to escape the terrible fate that awaits all artisans that build the tomb and its treasures. Why cannot beauty beget beauty? Why must there be wages of death and torture? Shah Jahan s passion for his queen is enshrined in the Taj Mahal. This enduring jewel in the face of time is once again built against the backdrop of untold cruelty and inhuman torture. Beauty at what price ?

At Rs.12,000, two tiny diamond flowers to decorate our ear lobes! Carbon wandering free in the atmosphere, captured though photosynthesis, locked into a poem called a tree. Finally buried in the very earth from which it arose. Millions of tones of earth and millions of years later, the elusive carbon has crystallized into one of the hardest substances known, a diamond. Little wonder they seem to last forever! Matching the stars in luster and glow! Nakshatra !

Constellations of carbon that bring delight our sense of beauty and let us be touched by infinity, that lasts beyond our finite lives ! Beautiful monuments built by nature through metamorphosis not destruction. We humans have a long, long way to go to touch forever! Otherwise can our monuments truly be a joy forever ?