SUNDAY, APRIL 28, 2024
Harshal Desai
To ogle, to wrong someone merely by one’s way of looking, to impute, to imply a dirtiness by sight, to generate a sort of revulsion within the other, an unpleasantness, a bitter disgust, is something that is not unknown to men. Many have employed their eyes, their offices of light, to this profane practice. It is important that we as men introspect within and around us, this harmful behaviour of ours.
So much of the world is endowed with sight. Seeing is something whose effects extend beyond the peripheries of our personal perception. With our eyes we see the world and seeing is something that affects the world. With our eyes we can cast something of an impingement on its forms. It is something that moves about, can affect others, forms of our sight, objects of our optics, people moving about the earth. People who are more than something to look at, people who are loved by other people.
This then, is my plea. Your eyes, your body, your being, your thought in others must be as soft as ‘a feather brushing an arm’, as gentle as the light at dawn on still sleeping bodies, as peaceful to recollect as ‘stretched strips of colourful sarees in fields’, as sweet to smell as when a fruit falls to the ground and sits open for the airs to come and carry its sweetness as news to all birds and ants and the worms that worry about the earth like aged lines. It must not enter the light- gilt lake of an else's living (whose cool stone steps only what is dear to them has ascended and descended) as a dirty thing. But carry the flight of your eyes over life's face as soft, as unharming, as unintending, as silent, as a part of that kind sky - as is a bird. How gentle that creature that too is wordless. How unasking, their colours gleam in the light.
We must realise how hurtful, how weaponised, how poisoned, how irksome something as wordless as our eyes can be.
Like ladles they are, spilling everywhere, everything that they carry. A great thought must go into the ways of how one perhaps is likely to be seen, when seeing. A great care must go to cure our ways of seeing. Our eyes can be asking orbs of gentle care, the places where on our faces light has kissed us to sight. I am compelled to remember Goethe : “Light has called forth one organ to become its like, and thus the eye is formed by the light and for the light, ...”
Our eyes are the most delicate external organs that our body houses and are so dear to us. But such apprehension moves the mind when one realizes that a mere roll of the eyes of an unknown man can cause such hurt in people, such discomfort in the ones we love and hold dear that one wishes kindness of sight for everything has been conferred it.
