The Beauty in Ugly

One day, there are two men, walking down the street, looking for something in a part of a city which where all types of fruits can be found easily. They walk slowly, finding the best fruit that satisfied them most by asking the owners and judging the fruit’s condition according to their own justification, and normally they end up buying fruits with worst quality ever with their best effort of guessing alone.

For a sudden, one of them, Amad stop at a front of a watermelon’s shop. “Okay, now what? Watermelon? Are you kidding me?” Pie asked impatiently, after an hour wasting time at the city with nothing has been bought yet. Without hoping for the answer, Pie keep talking, “I don’t think it’s the best gift to Zali. He is in a hospital Amad and I’m not sure there is anyone whoever brings this as a give for their visit”.   Calmly Amad looked at Pie and answer his friend curiosity. “Don’t joke around Pie; I’m not that stupid yet, okay! But your idea, why not we become the first one to do that?” They both laugh without noticing that all their action is observing by the shop owner. After a while, Amad continue, “You know Pie, there is a story about watermelon I heard, and it’s a good one”. With a little excitement, Pie asked him to tell the story.

“This is not a fantasy or legend that I’m going to tell you. But it’s about women with an analogy of watermelon.  In normal appearance, there is nothing special about the watermelon that you can see. There are all same, with strikes outside and a round, green shapes that not too extractive to let your eyes to keep looking at it. The soft structure also not really please you as its need more attention so then it’ll not smash into pieces when fell down to the ground.

With a little creativity, the owner tried something new. He make a craft of the watermelon and some just have been divided into two, so the meat of fruit could be display to the public, in a hope that the changes he make will attract people to buy that fruit. Unfortunately, he was wrong. Only a few of his customer willing to buy that crafted watermelon, and the rest, they keep buying the normal, unattractive shape of watermelon. And normally, the last sold watermelon is the one with beautiful looking because there is no other choice left, or that fruit will end up eating by the owner himself. 

One day, he makes a decision to ask the costumers why this is happen. Why they don’t want to buy the watermelon in beauty instead of ugly in looking, because for him the red, juicy and fresh looking inside is much better. A customer shares his thought regarding the questions that keep bothering the Owner. “Yes, we love to see the meat of fruit and not to mention to touch and try it if you don’t care. But it’s just for a tester, just to extract us to get closer and enjoy the beauty. Sometimes, if we have an opportunity, we’ll try it either its feel as good as it look or, you know, no need for me explains, right? If that one does feel tasty, then we will buy the other watermelon in the shop because we believe it’ll test much better than the one we tried. You know why? Because we not really sure how clean the fruit could be because it already be touched by other people before. So that why we call it a beauty in ugly”.

Written by Nik Ahmad Fariq Bin Nik Ibrahim

Friday, June 04, 2010