A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:

Its loveliness increases;

it will never pass into nothingness;

The iconic opening lines of the poem Endymion (1818) by John Keats - never fails to send a thrill through the soul every time the line dances through your mind. When a person experiences beauty, the joy of this experience increases every time it is remembered. Such is the overwhelming power of a thing of beauty.

A garden full of red roses is a thing of beauty forever as the richness of the red hues send waves of joy mingled with the alluring fragrance of the flowers through the air. As you walk along the garden path, next comes a garden full of roses of diverse hues in a riot of alluring scents and distinctive colours – red, orange, yellow, pink, white – the sheer beauty of the diversity of colours where the red rose is as fragrant and as joyous as the orange, yellow, pink, white roses– equal, fraternal, free. One garden, red roses; One garden, roses of many colours.

What makes societies and nations a thing of beauty and a joy forever is precisely because they are a garden of roses of many hues. There is so much diversity that one life time is insufficient to savour the rich tapestry of so many diverse strands of food, faith, attire, speech, behaviours, Whether this diversity is experienced as a thing of beauty and a joy forever depends on whether it is celebrated or stifled as a result of joyous diversity morphing into stultifying divisiveness, when as depicted by Rabindranath Tagore “the world is broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls”. When diversity is ruptured through polarization and demonization of the other, societies shrivel and shrink into their cocoons of fear even as contending parties battle for turf and territoriality, power and dominance, leading to social tensions and ruptures. The alternative is the celebration of diversity and seeking a thing of beauty of a community which is equal, fraternal, fair and free and a joy forever. The question is which of the above two designs would contribute to the sublimating aspiration and mission of “making others more”.

Making others more is not just about relationships but about examining the “state of relatedness” among diverse social entities in the quest for dignified coexistence through negotiated designs of fraternal solidarity.