The various flavours of coffee

“Remember that Dove-Yahoo contest, the one about Real Beauty? I think I might just write something on that.”


“Waxing eloquent on a little brook, a baby girl, a profound poem, eh? How alpha male."

“Yes, get me a pink javelin for my next birthday.”

“But seriously. Hardly your genre. What inspires this tectonic shift in writing?”

“One should always venture to expand his realms. Alexander wouldn’t be he, if he had stuck to Greece. Also, I am a very deep and profound person and often think about things like real booty erm beauty, duty, even annuity.”

“I should have known, there is a big prize.”

“You think that money could corrupt a purist like me? Good going, Sherlock. Coffee?”

“You know, it is difficult to give it a specific definition. Beauty can mean a lot of things.”

“Or maybe we don’t have to build a cage. Words can be beautiful too. All one needs to know is how to weave them into an essence.”

“When I was a little girl, I thought Steffi Graf was the most beautiful woman in the world. And Salman was so handsome. I wanted them to get married to each other. Ha, back then I knew beauty only in its skin.”

“While I gazed admiringly at Pamela Anderson running on that California beach. What a woman.”

“Eww. You men are such idiots. Absolutely no class.”

“She was saving people from drowning. What a heroic woman. I’d give her a Bharat Ratna if I could”

“If Miss Anderson is going to be the essence of your essay, may God bless you. But it is a very ‘Miss World’ question, what true beauty means to you.You expect a person to immediately start looking serious, have that optimistic gleam in their eye before they set forth declaring how true beauty is not skin deep, and how it encompasses grace and sensitivity, strength and compassion in equal measures. Inner beauty, is of course, far greater than external beauty. And they are right, no doubt. But isn’t that being too cliched? Surely, one expects more."


"Yes, let convention be damned. Remember when India won the cricket world cup. In the immediate moments after Dhoni’s six, a team ran beserk around a field, with Tendulkar in the lead. In those few moments, as the screen displayed ‘World Champions’, as I looked around, a thousand others laughed, cried, screamed, sang, prayed, waved their flags and pumped their fists in glorious ecstasy around me at the Wankhede. In Sachin's smile, in his team mates’ gay abandon, in the words on the screen and in the people around me, there was a beauty, surreal like I quite hadn't seen before."

"I bet you were weeping buckets. But I think I know what you mean by surreal. This goes back to 2001. It was a dark night"

"Stormy too?"

"Shh. Pass the coffee. It was around 4 am, and I was walking on a narrow rail track with a bunch of friends, in the Western Ghats, in the middle of nowhere. Minutes earlier, we had alighted at Castlerock station, having planned to trek the twenty odd kilometers to Doodhsagar waterfalls by foot. As we plodded along, my friend grabbed my jacket to show me a shooting star. I missed it, but a moment later, I saw one on my right. Within seconds, the whole sky was ablaze with shooting stars. Not in tens, but in hundreds. So stunned were we, that even after the spectacle ended, we remained transfixed for a few minutes. It takes some doing to silence a group of college kids, but we were absolutely numbed by the sight. The next day the newspapers reported that there had been a meteor shower the previous night. The clear skies of the Ghats had held my hand and knocked on the gates of beauty.I had never seen such scenes before.

"I wonder if it were the Ghats, and not the Planetarium."

"More interestingly, neither story had any mention of love."

"Criminal. A conversation is hardly one, if it does not have an element of love in it, no?"

"Touche!"

"Sometime, somewhere I did fall in love. And when I did, I was overwhelmed by it. In it, in her, I found myself. There's no feeling as beautiful as that.

You see, the point is true beauty cannot be captured in one definition. But yes, true beauty is a feeling or sensation that triggers a sense of joy, or wonder or admiration in the soul it seduces. It can be fleeting, or permanent, but while it lasts it causes a positive change in the workings of your heart."

“Hmm, look at those young girls. I wish I was sixteen too, not a care in the world.”

“At the risk of quoting Miss Jane Austen, it sometimes happens that a woman is handsomer at twenty-six than she was ten years before."

“Talking about me?”

“Again, coffee?”

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This article is a part of the indiblogger and Yahoo! India - Dove contest "What does Real Beauty Mean to you?"

This is where you should vote if you like me enough, right here . Non indiblogger users can click on the fb app. here. Cheers!





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