Beauty Pageants

This week has been incredibly exciting for India. Raghu from Roadies joined the Aam Aadmi Party making it the first political outfit to have a candidate who could campaign at two areas simultaneously. The Election Commission of India decided to ban outright display of election symbols, giving Indian men another excuse to keep their hands hidden playing pocket snooker.

Last but not the least, Robert De Niro paid Anupam Kher a visit so they could debate whether son Sikander’s career was worth saving. The most crucial of all however was India’s failure at the Miss Universe pageant. Beauty pageants have always had a special place in my heart. As a child I was allowed to watch them with family because staring at women while drool came out of my mouth was supposedly a matter of national pride. I especially remember the costume round because it led to me asking my first racist question in public, “If African countries are so poor how come they have fruits on their hats?” The only problem was the swimsuit round where the moment a woman walked on screen in a bikini someone in my family would jump and cover my eyes with their hand as if they were Rahul Dravid taking a catch at slip.

I learnt very quickly however that Venezuela had some form of SC/ST quota and would always end up in the final round while Miss India, despite pool sessions with Mickey Mehta, was not always favoured to win. Regardless, our sense of wanting to feel like a world superpower by winning a corporation driven beauty contest made Amitabh Bachchan go bankrupt. Nowadays it just feels like most of India doesn’t care. One reason is that the world and universe pageant aren’t the only ones competing for our mindshare. Even entertainment channels like ETC Punjabi are crowning women with titles like “Miss Punjabi” where everyone’s talent is being a singer and judges give tough feedback like “Suit bahut sohna paaya hega hai”.

Multiply this across regions and add talent shows like Indian Idol and Dance India Dance to the mix and you’re saturated with possibilities for men and women to attain the stardom and financial stability they aspire for. A beauty pageant in isolation doesn’t hold much appeal as it did when it was pretending to be a socialist economy. As a consequence, the exercise of participating in Miss India and going on to represent the country in global beauty pageants is considered a more individual one than something that the whole country needs to be emotionally invested in.

The result of the pageants is immaterial given that everyone already knows the outcome would be a role in a Bollywood film and if nothing else a few advertisement campaigns. Our relationship with our pageant winners has become passive and the investment we made in the likes of Sushmita Sen and Aishwarya Rai are not something any current pageant contestant can or should expect. What I can still get behind however is devising a way to prevent Miss Venezuela, the N Srinivasan of the Miss Universe competition, from somehow winning.

Even Chinese badminton players are looking at the contest saying this is getting ridiculous. If like me you’re bored of conventional contests, head over to Nepal where this week they hosted their first gay beauty pageant. For once it’s a pageant that’s breaking stereotypes and you want to catch it before the corporations swoop in and turn it into Emami Fair and Handsome presents Mr Handsome!