Appreciate!

‘Musée du Louvre’, the most visited art museum in the world! 4-5 young men walking in a gallary, slowly, looking at paintings, both sides. Here comes the famous work by Jacques-Louis David, ‘the coronation of Napoleon’. Here comes ‘John the Baptist’ by leonardo da vinci. YES! the one which leonardo da vinci paited himself, not a photo-copy. But they’re walking, just walking. With the same speed, 1 step in 2 seconds. They’re aware of one thing that it’s the famous Louvre Museum and they really want to appreciate everything. The paintings, sculptures, very old pots of babylonian time etc. etc. But appreciation is not possible while you’re standing or walking. They say-lets find a place to appreciate these things. No explanation required-all of them understand the code language. Some day when you’re dead tired or you’re not even slightly interested in art-work, you’d understand that language too. If you still didn’t get what they meant, they’re looking for a place to SIT.

But sad news for them! they’re not the only ones who want to ‘appreciate’. There are more, I mean too many-just like them. Wherever there are seats, lot of people are already appreciating. They move on but no luck this time either. Now one of them sees through the window and voila! there is some space around the big sculptures(or statues, whatever)and they go downstairs and right towards the PLACE. No sooner they begin their appreciation, a security personnel comes and asks them to stand up, “Not a place to sit”.

We had audio-guides too and whenever the weight hanging in the neck reminded us of 5 euros, all of us pressed some number and started learning about the history, for not more than a minute in any case. I found a 20 seconds long music track in the audio-guide(which was really good) so I just listened to that, probably more than 100 times. The time is passing away but we knew every second of it which seemed like an hour.

Now we entered into a hall and a saw huge crowd. Somebody said-look! there is monalisa! We opened our eyes for the first time. You guessed it wrong. Not to see monalisa, nobody even gazed at it but to find some space in the crowd and take one picture having monalisa in the backgroud. When was this painted?Who was Monalisa? Some questions went through my mind and I started using my audio-guide. It was too boring to be continued and I excused that I’ll wiki these questions later. We moved on like every other time in search of a place to appreciate…..that was never to be found!

the park-bench

“Ohh! there is that park and there might be some benches”. You’d be surprised if you hear 10 people saying this, all at one time and all of them have crossed their teen-years. You’d be shocked if you know that all of them are studying in one of the best institutes of world and it’s pretty sure that they’re going to be very rich and successful. But they were not born in a rich country and their parents don’t have loads of money. It is their own ability that has brought them in Europe for three months. Technically they’re here for ‘Internship’ but who likes research?. They want to see the world, the most beautiful parts of it. They all know that it’ll not be possible in their professional career so why not now? Even if they have to spend nights sleeping on benches of public parks, they’ll go out every week-end. Even if they’ve to walk 40 km in a day to visit an entire city like Rome or Barcelona, they’ll go out still.

I’ve never known this outlook of humans towards a park. It is supposed to be a place for jogging and for kids to play and for love-birds to meet but whenever we see a park, our eyes want to spot a few benches just like eyes of cat want to spot a rat. It is necessary to find a shelter otherwise we’ll not be able to sleep and next day everybody will feel lethargic. We don’t care if some police-man comes in the middle of night and kicks us all away or there happens to be a rain-fall. We’ll think about it when it actually happens, till then- we look for parks and nothing else in them, only the benches.