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few people are poets.
I am reminded of Rabindranath Tagore. He absolutely insisted that there is only one definition of the ultimate experience, and that is satyam-shivam-sundram. He could not conceive of the ultimate experience not having beauty in it. He could drop anything but beauty. His poetic soul was even ready to say that you can drop truth, you can drop godliness, but please save beauty.
It happened that Mahatma Gandhi wanted the temples of Khajuraho ... which are some of the most beautiful creations of man -- there is nothing comparable on the whole earth. The temples of Puri and Konarak, which are similar, have not achieved the perfection of Khajuraho. There must have been at least one hundred temples, very big temples, and you cannot find even a single inch which has not been carved, which has not been made beautiful. Naked men and women in different postures of love ... naturally Gandhi was very much annoyed, and he wanted at first to demolish these temples.
Seventy temples had already been demolished by the Mohammedans, because Mohammedans have a fanatical attitude that God cannot be represented in any statue, picture or anything.
It is perfectly okay if it is your idea, but to interfere with somebody else's idea becomes idiotic. Somebody wants his god to be expressed in a statue -- who are you? But every religion thinks it is responsible for the whole of humanity and it intends to impose its idea on every human being. So when the Mohammedans came, they could not believe it; they destroyed seventy temples of tremendous value.
But thirty of these temples were hidden in thick forest, so they were saved. Now what Mohammedans had done, Gandhi wanted to do -- for a different reason, but what he wanted to do was the same, to demolish them. He was afraid that, "These temples will show the whole world that we are not very moral people, that we are not puritans."
What kind of temples are these, in which each temple has thousands of couples carved in stone? Full-sized men and women, so beautiful that once you have seen a Khajuraho temple woman, a statue, no woman will look beautiful to you! Every woman will look just
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