HVK Archives: Beauty Bashing - an editorial
Beauty Bashing - an editorial - The Times of India
Editorial
()
13 September 1996
Title : Beauty Bashing
Author : Editorial
Publication : The Times of India
Date : September 13, 1996
Beauty is potent, money is omnipotent, goes a proverb,
suggesting that it is moolah in the makeover market which
is at the bottom of film star Amitabh Bachchan's sudden
conversion to the cause of the comely. But then what
explains the madness of those who would rather die-quite
literally at that - than have beauties judged in a
contest? Bachchan no doubt pulled out all stops when he
bid for and won the hosting rights to the Miss World
pageant. After all, globalised India was now more firmly
on the beauty map than ever before and the garden city of
Bangalore matched the very best in the world for glamour
and grooming. There was also the clincher: If he, the Big
B (as in Big Bucks), Bollywood's biggest business, was
offering to anchor the show, surely the show had to go
on? But what the Big B obviously did not bargain for was
the threat to the last claim from protesters, including
suicide squads. Indeed, barely had Bachchan signed on the
dotted line when the howls began. There were the usual
dissenters, of course - the kind which rushes to show
black flags to Sushmita Sen and despairs of a milieu
where ever a grand - daughter of grand old Jyoti Basu is
bitten by the beauty bug. But the surprise packet this
time was the suicide squads: The announcement came from
two groups, one Hindu and one Muslim, establishing that
when it comes to things 'fundamental' the two are, in
fact, one.
The formation of suicide squads to protest a beauty
pageant may be making a volcano out of a molehill, but it
shows just how easily we work up hysteria. The more
dismissible an event, the more our outrage. Kentucky
Fried Chicken it was then, Miss World it is now. And the
reason proffered is the same each time : that these
concepts will not just stop at threatening our culture,
in time they will undermine and subsume it. The two broad
objections to beauty contests are that one,it commodities
women and, two, it standardies beauty when, in fact,
beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder. A third school
believes that such contests promote an unreal, unhealthy
hankering for the perfect look, leading to entirely
avoidable frustrations in the young. The answer to all
this must only lie in the proven resilience of Indian
culture. Besides, there was probably no time when beauty
was not celebrate. What better testimony of this than the
famed paintings of Ajanta and the sculptures of
Khajuraho? As for the fear today's long-legged anorexic
beauty is on her way to becoming the ultimate icon and
spawning an entire generation of mindless, semi-crazed
imitators, surely that is doing a disservice to the
individual judgement of our people, the foundation-stone
of our enduring democracy? The debonair looks of Dev
Anand, the bewitching charm of Madhubala and even the
abundant oomph of Madhuri Dixit are, in the final
analysis, only transient curiosities. What is currently
in vogue is only currently in vogue; tomorrow will bring
another fashion and another set of protesters. Even fads,
whether in the world of fashion or fanaticism, are
subject to the laws of the market. Self-righteous
indignation then, like transitory beauty, is only skin
deep. And neither should be taken too seriously.
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