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As
a premise, it's almost as perfect as Yukta Mookhey's post-Miss India cosmetically-aided
teeth. Take India's burgeoning beauty industry and assess its social impact.
Read Naomi Wolf's The Beauty Myth, borrow generously from it (and acknowledge
it so that a Bryan Appleyard does not happen to you) and market it to
a publishing house which realises that the novelty of novels has worn
off.
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THE BEAUTY GAME
By Anita Anand
Penguin
Price: Rs 250
Pages: 205 |
The only problem: there is life beyond beauty pageants. And as the declining
careers of several Miss Indias show, winning the lipstick war doesn't
necessarily prepare them for it. Whether it is Oxana Fedorova being fired
as Miss Universe for being married or Neha Dhupia's alarmingly enhanced
hips that were the butt of all jokes at the recent Lakme India Fashion
Week, the inbuilt obsolescence of the beauty business doesn't make it
to the glossies.
It is these pretty papers that tend to provide the substance of Anita
Anand's text and mindset. So out go uncomfortable truths like a cosmetics
industry where the boom is yet to materialise, a fashion industry where
trousseau collections are still what puts the roti and dal on the table
and a women's magazine trade where the bottom has been scraped (and it
still has cracked heels). In comes twaddle like "in a democracy,
women have to be allowed to make choices''. Even if it involves wearing
six-inch heels and Wonderbras-via-Singapore to bed.
But is that all that Indian women want? Should we form the perfect O
of simulated surprise like a Miss World winner because a six-year-old
wannabe glam girl has changed her name from Ila to Aishwarya? Anand would
see it as a sign of progress, as "one of the mechanisms, among many,
for women's empowerment''. As for me, I'll wait for Ila/Aishwarya to grow
up. Perhaps she will become a pageant princess. More likely she will be
a bulimic bombshell.
 
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Terrorism's New Strategy
CURRENT
ISSUE OCTOBER 7, 2002
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