As a devotee, Srila Rupa Goswami expects us to be a 'kavi', or an expert in aesthetic taste. Human life is meant for tasting bhakti-rasa. It may be okay if a newcomer in Krishna-bhakti may not be immediately able to appreciate the deeper aspects of Krishna-bhakti and its rasas. However, the same cannot be said about someone who has been practicing for more than a decade or two.
If one remains an arasika — a person devoid of any taste for bhakti-rasa, one has not sufficiently utilized the human form of life.
Once, in an assembly of such expert rasika poets, there arrived a person who had no knowledge of arts, music or literature. This one person was sufficient to single-handedly bring down the entire mood of the assembly. Seeing such an arasika, Bhartṛhari composed the following verse:
sāhitya-saṅgīta-kalā-vihīnaḥ
sākṣāt paśuḥ puccha-viṣāṇa-hīnaḥ
tṛnaṁ na khādann api jīvamānas
tad-bhāgadeyaṁ paramaṁ paśūnām
"Persons devoid of any taste in literature, music or arts are verily like animals without tails and horns.
[but still there is a difference between animals and such people].
The only difference is that the animals eat grass for surviving, while such people do not, and this should be considered the supreme good fortune of the animals [for if such people started eating grass, the poor animals would have nothing left to eat]."
— (Nīti-śataka of Bhartṛhari, Verse 12)
(Originally posted on Facebook on 12th April 2015).
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