Defining beauty is no less than fixing a jigsaw puzzle. Intellectuals have delineated the various contours of beauty in their own subtle and sublime way. The laymen though less profoundly also dwell on the idea with their own sanity and sense of understanding.
A literary adage "the beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder" cuts ice with the scholarly and the rustic alike. It seems that whole world has turned unrecognizably wired and people have an erroneous idea of beauty. Wearing gorgeous and bewitchingly swanky branded attires can make one extremely pleasant to the outward eye but if he exudes inordinate and obdurate pride, he is immediately reduced to a bête noir to the others because of his sheer callous and condescending ways.
The dictum "handsome is that handsome does" can never be relegated to the corner of obsolete cliches. It is our actions and behavioural patterns that make us either attractive or repulsive. If a person is clad in ordinary clothes but his mind is shorn of all the malice and malevolence, he can rightly be adjudged as the paragon of real beauty. A beauty that makes its manifestation evident when the love is unaffected. His tongue is neither acerbic nor acrid.
Souls like Mother Teresa and Dr APJ Kalam are the people who epitomize the concept of real beauty and make it unequivocally understandable. There is a large number of such people worldwide and with their handsome deeds and beautiful behavior, endear themselves to the masses. This world can only be redeemed of its shoddiness and slovenliness if the minds are beautified. But man with his distorted definition of beauty is squandering his energies and resources elsewhere.
The revered Buddha's charismatic charms are still capable of holding us spell-bound because of the quality of his life, not his robes. Once while delivering his sermons, Buddha was asked of beauty by one of his followers. He responded that one must not be proud of one's physical beauty rather one must diligently cultivate the beauty of soul. The body is bound to perish. One must strive to make one's soul beautiful not with cosmetics but karmic changes.