Have you ever seen something break? No, I'm not talking about seeing an object intact and then the broken pieces. Have you seen it break? When, say a vase, is knocked off the table, have you noticed the moment it starts falling, unaware of it's fate? The quick fall followed by the moment when it touches the ground and realizes it's too late. The first sign of the cracks which quickly spreads and before you know it, right before you're eyes, it's in pieces.You could have done nothing. Or is it possible that you could have caught it mid air? Or put your palms on the floor right where it was going to fall to decrease the impact on it, thereby hurting your palms? It was all so slow, in hyper definition and all so fast at the same time. Its life has ended even before you realized that it was falling.
There is a word in Japanese - Kintsukuroi which means to repair with gold. It is the art of repairing pottery with gold or silver lacquer and understanding that piece is more beautiful for having been broken. Did you notice that the pieces are repaired with gold or silver which stand at Rs 3000/- and Rs 38/- per gram respectively? And if you type kintsukuroi in google, it only shows images of pottery mended with gold and hardly any with silver (I found none). Why does it take something so costly, not easily available to make the broken vase beautiful? Why can't I just put it together with Feviquik (super glue) and expect everyone to consider it beautiful? I can also paint over it, have a nice mural of some kind. But wait, that might mean I want to hide that it's broken. How many of us can afford gold? Not to forget all the instruments to mend the pot. Many of us will just replace the pot with a better one and for some of us, to whom the vase was special, we will sweep every piece of it from the floor, carefully cover it with paper and hide it in some corner of the loft hoping that someday, it will see daylight when things are better. Until then, all that's left are the memories, the stories that we will tell our guests when they spot the empty space and ask why there is nothing there. We'll say how it stayed with us for so many years, all the times it was almost broken and the last time it did; Only to see a day when we spot another one in the showroom and buy it. But will we have the heart to place the new vase in the same place or will we make some new place for this one?
There is a word in Japanese - Kintsukuroi which means to repair with gold. It is the art of repairing pottery with gold or silver lacquer and understanding that piece is more beautiful for having been broken. Did you notice that the pieces are repaired with gold or silver which stand at Rs 3000/- and Rs 38/- per gram respectively? And if you type kintsukuroi in google, it only shows images of pottery mended with gold and hardly any with silver (I found none). Why does it take something so costly, not easily available to make the broken vase beautiful? Why can't I just put it together with Feviquik (super glue) and expect everyone to consider it beautiful? I can also paint over it, have a nice mural of some kind. But wait, that might mean I want to hide that it's broken. How many of us can afford gold? Not to forget all the instruments to mend the pot. Many of us will just replace the pot with a better one and for some of us, to whom the vase was special, we will sweep every piece of it from the floor, carefully cover it with paper and hide it in some corner of the loft hoping that someday, it will see daylight when things are better. Until then, all that's left are the memories, the stories that we will tell our guests when they spot the empty space and ask why there is nothing there. We'll say how it stayed with us for so many years, all the times it was almost broken and the last time it did; Only to see a day when we spot another one in the showroom and buy it. But will we have the heart to place the new vase in the same place or will we make some new place for this one?
