Art, Naturally!

Somewhere in the countryside of Incredible India he roamed like a spirit in those woods, collecting pieces of wood and branches that appeared like a divine form of art to him. There are a hundred ways in which the human mind can express itself, and sometimes the abstract is beautiful.
It was a few years back in my days of youth that I visited him, forgive my absolute lack of memory because I don’t recall the exact place or date, and in that house saw his perception of what he thought to be magnificent art. I laughed out loud (LOLed in its actual sense) at the sight; such figures were a very amusing sight to my innocent and foolish mind. See what that man had done was collect such branches from the forest floor and polish…them that’s all. And he saw beauty in them, figures of men and women and birds and animals and all sorts of other things. He had called it ‘au naturel art’ I remember distinctly. 
 It had achieved a decent level of fame now in the stagnant lands of cultural richness, Bengal. It was a small galleria in the town of the Nobel poet, the town of Shanti-Niketan. This was years later, when I was an adolescent. The memory of the man who saw figurines in wood a distant memory tucked away in some corner. This was slightly different, it was rocks. This particular gallery contained rocks and stones found naturally in the countryside that looked peculiarly like some figure. One like Ganesha, one like a swan and another like a bull…there were all sorts of rocks that met the eye.
  I was never really a great fan on art and was still very bemused at this entire display, quite like the younger version of me. Evidently I hadn’t matured much.  As we walked through the gallery, most of the art was met by cynical remarks and over-smart wise cracks.
 After we left the small gallery my parents tried to explain how very often there is beauty in the abstract. I didn’t quite understand what they were talking up. A couple of years passed and I moved out and went to the city of bright lights, Mumbai, to do my college. This one time when I was flying back to Bangalore and my i-pod didn’t quite seem to work right I found myself looking outside the window. I didn’t have much of a choice as my rather faithful companion had finally stopped functioning like its fine prior self.
Lo! As I looked outside the window I saw so many picturesque images in the clouds. I won’t even go into the details and description of all the things I did see, but I could tell you that I could swear by Jove that one cloud even looked like a tele tubby.
The flight landed and I went back home after the tiring journey from the Bangalore airport to the city. My parents were never told, I really didn’t want to admit to my folks that they were right all along, right through my childhood. The joke was on me. But yes! I had myself discovered now, what they all call ‘beauty in the abstract’