Human Beauty and Our Attitudes

One of my favorite personalities in history, Abraham Lincoln had said, "all of us are the children of conditions, of circumstances, of environment, of education, of acquired habits and of heredity, molding men as they are and will for ever be”.

 I want to discuss one thing that affects our behaviors with other people; our perception of our beauty and other's attitude in this regard towards us.

Almost all humans have inborn appreciation of beauty and they first find it in themselves since childhood when others praise them with such words

“What a beautiful kid!” “Good boy/girl” “Little angel!” and so on. These words have some positive and negative affects on our personality if not carefully monitored and guided by elders. Normally if the parents are normal- looking people, they represent their children showily before others. This makes them further perceptible about their outstanding looks.

When children join school, they receive more or less attention from their fellow students and teachers based on their beauty. In teen agers, this attitude reaches its peek point when sexual attraction adds to it.

Physical attractiveness has some benefits.

1.    It enhances self-esteem and develops self-confidence.

2.    It helps communicating with others. Beautiful children are normally less shy if they have no other physical or mental handicap like a stammer in talk, squinting eyes etc.

3.    As attractive persons have the plus point of good looks, if they have acquired some academic achievements, they are able to get good jobs making use of the above mentioned points.

4.    Usually their beauty is transmitted into their children if the spouse is not very ugly.

The negative aspects of physical beauty might be

1.    Superiority complex and the resulting scornful attitude towards others - mostly ugly people.

2.    Sometimes extraordinary beautiful people owing to their abnormally high self-confidence are unable to focus on their education and personality-enhancing things like good manners, style of conversation, personal hygiene etc.

3.    They expect victory in every field, and when they have to face failure, its overall result might be severe personality disorder. Stories presented in our films, TV dramas and novels etc are also behind this tradition of misleading the people. Heroes and heroines are normally represented as beautiful. In reality, history tells that most great men of the world were not necessarily beautiful people.

In my opinion the role of parents and teachers is very important about this issue. They need to tell their children that

·        One should be proud of ones personal achievements not those things which are out of their control.

·        All humans are equal. Is the blood of ugly people of some different color other than red? Beauty is an outward, apparent thing the real beauty is ones’ thoughts, morality and respect for others.

And to the elders, I request them to treat all the children alike. All the children deserve love, care and attention. Please never distribute these things in quotas; you don’t have to spend money on these minor but very important gifts of civilization.