Beautiful Lives

Our world has beautiful people and ugly people, beautiful places and ugly places, people with lovely characters and people with foul characters and the various mixes of it all. The beautiful people are not always those with lovely characters and there are ugly people with lovely characters. There are ugly people living lovely lives and lovely people living ugly ones. Once in a while, through it all, one finds a beautiful person with a lovely character living a beautiful life, but only rarely.

One need not travel far and wide to see it all nowadays because of electronic media but when one does travel, one gets a better feel of it.  My younger life was full of travel around the country and around the world but after the age of fifty travels came down rapidly. The urge to travel as well as the energy for it was exhausted. Nevertheless, I still make brief trips every now and then as a recent one I made by train through North India.

I met many people on the train and saw many places, both beautiful ones and ugly ones. There was a group of students on one of the trips who found my name and searched it on Google on their smart phones. They were impressed with what they found. One said that there was a bright shine and aura around my face. Perhaps one gets a bit from the Sun when one strives to spend time in doing good for the world rather than just one’s own self or family only. The Sun does that for all life on our planet. Then they wanted selfies with me and had a lot of questions. I suggested to them that through developing focus of mind on whatever it is they do, they shall do well in their forthcoming exams but not to worry whatever the result after one has done one’s bit. After all, some of the most successful people in our world like Bill Gates are college dropouts. 

One of the students asked me a little later what I was thinking about. I told him I was just observing how people live in various towns and villages that the train passed by. Perhaps I could have told him more, that I was also thinking of how all the places I saw en-route could be made more beautiful, for how to improve what exists has been a major occupation through my life, both through my profession and now when I am retired from it. Moreover, when one creates beauty around one, then one is restoring one’s own soul.

In my blogs I have left a broader message for the wider world. Life is ever changing and those with lovely lives now may face difficult ones in future, those with difficult ones now will find lovely ones after some time. Filling one’s heart with love, truth and simplicity and the mind with humility and gratitude, while inculcating discipline, focus and order in one’s activities and thoughts, those with beautiful lives shall not just be able to sustain it but make it more beautiful while those with ugly lives shall enter beautiful lives sooner.

In New Delhi, I stayed with a godson who came to work in New Delhi because he found a really good and comfortable job. He stays in a tiny one-room studio apartment because rents for larger spaces in the city are steep. The room had a kitchen counter on one side and a single bed on the other. He gave me the bed and spread a mattress for himself on the ground in the middle of the room. I was quite amazed at how organized and comfortable he had made even this tiny space. On return I applied my mind further to the design and configuration of single room accommodations for single persons for any future constructions of a similar nature for a similar need and came up with the following design that occupies approximately 275 square feet of covered area or less depending upon the width chosen for the central bedroom area. Anything between eight and twelve feet is feasible. The figure shown is a schematic with approximate dimensions. An engineer or an architect would be able to make the right adjustments. To that end I have enclosed some notes for them towards the end of this post.  The design is also suitable for a one-room cottage with a veranda added in front for a wilderness retreat. In this latter case one might consider expanding the kitchen width to seven feet to make room for a nice kitchen table and a kitchen cupboard to store rations. This blog has several other designs for larger cottages in some of its posts if an interested reader wished to search through.

Notes for an architect or engineer:  Walls have been shown as one foot in schematic in brick, external walls would be nine inches and internal ones 4 and a half inches wide. The lintels may be kept at seven feet height from DPC and the front one extended two feet into the room to create a roof for the closet and ledges for storage in bathroom and kitchen. That way it shall also create bedplates for the front portion of construction to strengthen corners. The kitchen counter shown here is two feet wide but one and a half feet is sufficient. The Back kitchen window can be changed into a back door to a clothesline and backyard if desired. Since there are few openings in front the construction is expandable in that direction.