While on my way towards my daily bus stop the other day, I suddenly got totally intrigued by the word ‘perfection’. It is a common common word used in daily conversation. After some thought through my journey, I was saddened to realize how badly the word is abused today, leaving the real meaning perpetually distorted.
Perfection has become impractical these days and standards have come down. Product reviews are common. Volumes of text by way of magazines, books, etc. are dedicated to reviews about books, cars, movies, cell phones, much about anything. Something is either too expensive, else its features are unbalanced and the ‘perfect score’ remains elusive. This may be attributed to the manufacturers who wanted the moolah too soon. Maybe, that’s what is practical and maybe there is nothing wrong with that; survival is important and a single minded perfectionist psyche is non-sustainable. But things are really made to degrade and consumerism is enforced compromising the ‘perfection’. Things like old German mechanical pencils are not any more that used to last forever.
Perfection has consequently started portraying a deceitful impression. I am doing a PhD and my advisor often comments on my results, ‘this is too good to be true’. On most investigations, I find results were the consequence of some experimental error. But what if it is not? What if the results are too good and true at the same time? The point I am trying to convey is that, it has become deeply rooted in the human psyche that perfection is untrustworthy, maybe because it has been perpetually deceiving.
Perfection is divine. An instance flashed back in my mind as soon as I started thinking about this. My friend told me once of carpet makers in the Middle East. Carpet weavers there can produce the finest carpets in the world, but leave a minor defect intentionally as perfection is considered divine there. The people who can produce perfection don’t want it, for one reason or the other.
