Chapters
Overview
An inquiry into the biological and cultural roots of beauty
How aesthetic awareness becomes the ground of human existence, creativity, and learning—far beyond decoration or taste.
The modern world treats beauty as a luxury—an elective subject, a gallery object, a lifestyle garnish. This book restores beauty to its rightful place: the organism’s way of staying in tune with reality. Beauty is life’s discipline for appropriateness and economy; it is how living systems avoid waste and discover form.
When schooling centralizes words before the world, senses dull. We are trained to analyze second-hand information and mistake it for first-hand knowledge. Awakening Beauty shows how this displacement creates alienation in children and adults alike—and how simple practices of attention, craft, and play resharpen the senses.
This is not an art-education manual. It is a framework for rehumanizing learning and work: reclaiming perception, recovering cultural specificity, and rejoining the ecological intelligence that moves through soils, hands, and communities.
.jpg)
Sensing Nature; Knowing Nature
Exploring tools, process and content
The first part of the book reflects on the Sensing Nature, Knowing Nature workshops I conducted between 2003 and 2007 with children aged 5 to 14. This section explores how children naturally engage with the world through their senses, their playfulness, and their inherent capacity for exploration
1
Re imagining Art
Reintegrating cognitive and aesthetic structure
The second part shares how the insights from the workshops were utilized to reimagine art education in schools. It discusses how art can be a means to retain children’s attention to the world around them, nurture their autonomy, and preserve the integrity of their sensory experiences.
2
Awakening Numbed Senses
Deschooling the Schooled
This section focuses on work with design and architecture students. It highlights efforts to help them unlearn habitual patterns shaped by formal schooling and to rekindle their natural abilities—to see, to sense, to play, and to reconnect with their innate aesthetic sensibility.
3
Musings
A Tentative articulations
The final part is a reflective exploration. It delves into themes of natural sensing, the numbing effects of schooling, the aesthetic sense, cultural erosion, colonization, tradition, and modernity—raising questions and offering insights drawn from lived experience.
4
PART 1
Sensing Nature; Knowing Nature
This two-month workshop took place during school holidays in Aruvacode, Nilambur, with children from the traditional potter community I had been working with since 1993. Although I had interacted with children earlier, it was only around 2003 that I began to look closely at their creative and aesthetic development. The workshop began as an experiment in contextual observation—helping children become deeply aware of their surroundings and then recreate what they perceived using simple materials. The official hours were 10 a.m. to 1 p.m., yet children arrived by 8, lingered past 5, and even appeared on Sundays, pulled by their own curiosity. Each day opened in silence, listening to the smallest and farthest sounds in nature. Children were placed in small groups of five or six, guided not by adults but by a few older children who ensured that everyone had access to materials—paint, brushes, paper, scissors, magazines, glue. Groups were formed based on available resources, and children stayed with one exploration for 7–10 days before shifting to another. What emerged was not a “workshop” in the modern sense but a living field of attention, sensory immersion, and self-directed discovery. In fact, this work is what set off to make the educated understand the harm we are doing to children and ourselves as we deny the very tool given by life to make sense of the world
PART 2
Reimagining ART
This section grows out of the Sensing Nature workshop, reimagining art in schools—not as a separate subject but as a practice that cultivates attention, presence, and perception. The aim was to keep children rooted in their world by using art to awaken and refine their senses. When the focus shifts from product to process, and from technique to observation, art becomes a way of seeing, sensing, and knowing. I conducted workshops in several schools to carry forward these learnings, encouraging direct explorations of nature and protecting children’s autonomy. These experiences revealed the vast, often unrecognised potential of children, and the organic nature of real learning. This led me to work increasingly with adults—parents and teachers—so they might understand why children need freedom, respect, and space to flower. I have tried to show them the dangers of schooling as it exists: a system that feeds children ready-made knowledge, cutting them off from the world and crippling their natural ability to create context-rooted expertise for themselves. Seeing how difficult it is to shift adult conditioning at scale, I began partnering with schools to explore how the damage of schooling might at least be reduced, and how art could become a doorway back to the living world.
PART 3
Explorations in Foundation Studies
— The first year of design and architectural education. This work sketches a blueprint for reclaiming our biologically rooted sense of beauty and natural cognition for all those you are trapped in the Literate paradigm. The difficulty with design and architecture students is stark: fifteen years of sense-numbing, mind-distorting schooling had already pushed them into authority-dependent modes of being. (This is the case with all the educated and only in design and architecture this gets revealed) The first task was to undo these cognitive and psychological habits, especially the loss of self-initiated learning. Autonomy had to be restored—psychologically and cognitively—so that learning could arise from experience, not from the mind’s linguistically manufactured understanding. A deeper colonization had to be confronted as well. Most design schools function inside a pseudo-western ambience, teaching ideas filtered through research and books written by Western designers and educationists, especially the Bauhaus lineage. Bauhaus was indeed one of the most important educational experiments—but its true gift was the spirit of exploration, not the conclusions it produced. To inherit their findings without inheriting their spirit is to fossilize the mind. Sometimes the wheel must be reinvented simply to stay alive. Biological systems thrive through reinvention, rediscovery, and re-creation—not by memorizing the past but by re-entering the world with fresh senses.
PART 4
Insights and Musings
Beauty is a threshold to wholeness – one that helps heal our inner fragmentation and opens the way to confronting the deeper cognitive crisis of modernity. The fundamental crisis of modernity began when human beings shifted from direct experience to abstract thinking and reasoning. Tragically, this shift – and its far-reaching consequences – has gone largely unnoticed. At every level, lived experience has been reduced to intellectual content, turning life itself into a set of topics for analysis. This movement away from process-orientation towards product-orientation lies at the heart of the modern disconnect from cognition, beauty, and value. It began with a subtle but critical transition: a disengagement from the realm of the unknown – the real, unfolding world – and a retreat into the realm of the known, the readymade: spoken, written, or digitized. This inquiry is not about returning to some romantic past. It is about learning to live again from the inside out – to attend, to feel, to cohere. In reflecting on my own journey, I do not offer solutions or methods. Instead, I seek to deepen our capacity to be. To live in the flow of life. To reclaim wholeness. To live ‘naturally’ once again.
