SOFT MAY NOT BE PALPABLE, BUT IS SURELY BEAUTIFUL

We live in a time surrounded by the hard, real and palpable. In the crevices of everything hard lies the soft. The hard rules over the soft. What you see wins over what you don’t

- HARISH BIJOOR

 

IF you haven’t read E F Schumacher yet, you must. This German-born British economist has been a childhood favourite of mine. The author of the epoch, Small is beautiful: A Study of Economics as if People Mattered (1973), left a very early impression in my mind as a kid growing up in the seventies. Small is indeed beautiful. More so today. Even as I am all grown up.

In 2022 (and in this article), I want to spin off a new phrase— ”Soft is Beautiful”—from Schumacher’s popular words. We live in a time when we are surrounded by the hard and the real and the palpable. In the crevices of everything hard, there lies the soft. In many ways, this “soft huge thing” that is ubiquitous everywhere (but seldom recognised to be important enough) is quite like the largest ‘organ’ (if you may call it that) of the human body, the interstitium. We still believe the skin is it. The hard rules over the soft. What you see wins over what you don’t.

Let me then jump out of economics and the physiology of the human body and dive straight into the lives we lead. We live in a society that is fast-tracked in every manner. We worship new gods today. We don’t worship trees as much as we do technologies that could get us fresh air. We don’t worship heritage, as we do the gigantic new buildings that spur our economic endeavour further and beyond. We don’t worship what is clean as much as we do what dirties up our planet the most.