Time was when Miss Indias were pretty as a picture. Neat, clean, well-groomed, and quite a joy to behold. But over the years, and particularly after 2000, the quality of Miss Indias have come down and this year is no different. No matter what others say about beauty contests being personality contests, I firmly believe that they are largely about looks. Because if it were brains that they were looking for, then they may as well have started quizzing contests, IQ tests and what not. But no, they have started beauty contests where contestants are made to strut their stuff in swimsuit rounds as well. So there.
This year’s winners are not a patch on the winners of yester years – Juhi Chawla, Sushmita Sen, Aishwarya Rai, Nafisa Joseph, Dia Mirza, Priyanka Chopra, Lara Dutta, Celina Jaitley, Gul Panag, Madhu Sapre, Yukta Mookhey, Sangeeta Bijlani, Mehr Jessia, Rekha, Zeenat Aman, Swaroop Sampat, Nafisa Ali and so on… All of these winners were easy on the eyes, intelligent, and mature. But this year’s winners may appear to be intelligent and mature through their answers in the personality round (I particularly liked 20-year-old Parvathy Omanakuttan from Kerala for her quotable quote: ‘Marriage is not when one completes the other but when both share their completeness”). However, she didn’t score high on looks. Even my neighbours are much better looking than she is.
After all, what’s a beauty contest if the person isn’t good looking to begin with?