What do you see in it???

Over the weekend, I visited a very famous art gallery and as soon as I stepped in, the first art form took me by shock. It was an artistic alignment of the human body parts. The artist was maybe trying to convey the beauty in death or life or I don't even know if he was trying to bring out beauty at all.

You know, artists are a strange bunch. They depict what their vision is, it necessarily need not be beautiful or soothing to the eye or pleasant. It is just something that catches their eye and they want to translate into art as their own perception. At least this is what I understand of them, but in lieu of the fact, that I did not understand any of the art at this abstract and modern art gallery, I am not much of an artist and I should not be commenting about how their minds work.

One thing I can comment about though, is the thought process of the common man, when they come across something as eclectic as this. The first thought that would come to our mind is 'what do they really see in this?'. Which leads to a string of thoughts, like what could have been the inspiration behind it or what makes them different from us that they see beauty and we draw a blank. If you are expecting me to give answers for this, thats not going to happen, remember how I told you about knowing nothing about such art.

Then you might think why I am wasting everybody's time and what am I trying to achieve by talking about it? It is just the perception of the common man on anything that deviates from what normal is supposed to be. We talk about artists being eccentric; great poets and musicians being unfathomable; scientists being geeky and what not.

So what is the norm, to not be successful, to move with the crowd, nod when everyone nods, applaud when everyone does? I don't know what it is supposed to be, but that is how it seems to work. But the biggest truth is that everybody feels they are 'normal' until that one little thing about them gets discovered. Till yesterday, I thought I was normal and I didn't understand why people had such unusual taste like weird art. But today when a friend exclaimed that he didn't get why people wasted all their lives studying about the birth and explosion of stars or the existence of some old dinosaur in some difficult-to-pronounce age, I realized that maybe I was not normal. Because, as embarrassed I was to admit it then, I did get it, I could understand how someone could get so fascinated by mystifying facts and be completely engulfed by it.

Am I not normal then? Now until yesterday, my husband was not normal because he gets excited with sci-fi movies and he imagines a world with regular time-travel and what not. But today, neither am I normal. So what's normal anyways??? What is the standard everybody is running by??? To think of it, I really can't bring myself  to point at set of rules that say this is what is expected.

To be eccentric or weird or whatever else people term it as, you need a goal. A goal that drives you towards it. A passion to understand something and reach that place where you can see everything clearly and where it doesn't matter what the world sees you as. I have come to realize that you set the norm for yourself. I see myself thinking about cures for cancer and I feel it is completely normal for everyday people to be lost in that thought, but it's not. Other people may find innovations in designing clothes a dream come true, but not me.

So does it allow me to call them abnormal? I don't think so, I can say for sure that I don't see what interests them, but that's all. If you really think about it, it is the other people not getting what you do that makes it exciting, It is the challenge that attracts you to it and that makes you different from everybody else. You might have others who share the same 'abnormality', but no two people can be similar enough to be excited by exactly the same aspect of the subject and that is what keeps us from becoming clones of each other. The universe is big enough and replete with minute details to fascinate someone, but be bland to someone else. Isn't that the biggest thrill of it all: everyone gets to have an obsession of their own. And that is something everyone will agree to possess, something that makes all of us 'normal'!!!!