Art serves as a medium for appreciating beauty. Throughout history, people have created various forms of art to express their admiration for beauty. But is this entirely true? Does art only embrace beauty and deny the existence of ugliness? Ugliness is also a part of our lives, just like beauty. Perhaps, the definition of art should be a means of expressing human emotions, encompassing both suffering and admiration. Art embraces both the beautiful and the uglier sides of the world equally.

As a child, I loved to see colorful pictures and drawings. It never occurred to me that someone could draw pictures of something scary, something so

miserable to contemplate. I came across a picture that portrayed a dead person, dying from starvation, lying on the ground near a dustbin, covered by

a crow on his face, with another crow and a dog waiting nearby to consume his corpse. I was disgusted; I was scared to see the painting, wondering

why a person would draw such a terrifying image. Much later, when I had already forgotten about the painting, I was studying the Bengali famine of

1943. During my lesson, our teacher told us about a series of famous sketches named 'Famine 1943' by Shilpacharja Zainul Abedin, which depicted the struggle of the famine when people were striving only for rice to eat, and the sole dream of the entire Bengal was to eat. The famine sketches

portrayed hunger and the cruelty of the man-made famine. From that lesson, I could only think of that scary painting I had long forgotten. The sketch

was one of the 11 sketches of the series.

Another sketch that terrified me the most was “Madona, 1943,” a portrait of a mother and child. It might be the most colorful and innocent among all

the other types of portraits, a pleasant picture to look at. But “Madona 1943” by Zainul Abedin, to me, was a portrayal of hunger and death, depicting

a mother already dead of starvation with a raw-boned child, starving and waiting to die. The unbearable sketch of hunger and death terrified me. Those

sketches were created with Chinese ink and brush; there was no use of color but black and white, portraying the struggle. Misery and struggles are

always colorless; they can only be black and white.

A thousand words cannot express such a raw feeling of struggle. I question myself: do I admire the sketches? --- No, I don’t, I can’t. I cannot admire hunger, misery, and death.

Yet, the sketches have never left my heart. They remind me of cruelty, hunger, and death, the dark and unspoken truth about the world