Learn from the beauties

Though there are several stages of dress in a beauty queen contest, the roving eye is focused on the contestants when maximum economy in strategic coverage has been exercised. While this deficit in dress might raise the hackles of straight-laced ladies not having the curve or the nerve to preen themselves, they should charitably admit that mankind has to learn a few lessons from such beauties.

First the smile. Those who have seen a frowning beauty contestant please raise your hands. No? That’s it. There are none. It is all smiles, miles of them. Mind you, one requires guts to smile like a Cheshire cat while strutting on a pair of stilettos that elevates the posterior like a car jacked up to change tyre. How many can do that?

Victory should call for humility. Yet, when a bowler scalps a star batsman with his sizzling yorker, he lets loose gestures peppered with bilingual expletives frowned upon in polite circles. But does a crowned Miss make wild or unfeminine gestures with her manicured hands when declared winner of the coveted title? Or run round in circles on the stage daintily lifting her slinky evening gown a little for unhindered speed? No. The crowned girl, simply sobs her heart out, while the two runners-up, attach their broad smiling faces, on both sides of the winner, presenting a symmetrical threesome like the Ashoka Lions.

But the cat-walking models are a different kettle of golden fish. They do not overtly display any sign of emotion. As they cross each other on the ramp, they avoid eye contact, like two arch political rivals accidentally meeting at a wedding. All this is cultivated ruse because, at the end, all troop in like a coo-coo train waving and smiling, without animus, with their blusing fashion designer making a brief appearance.

The message that emerges is that the resident beast of jealousy in all of us are to be kept on a tight leash. What the religious heads preach are being practised by the beauties which goes unnoticed as the people who watch them notice only the other noticeable things. Beauty may be skin deep but the lasses who contest or catwalk reveal that there are other subcutaneous layers of camaraderie, bonhomie and so forth. So, ladies and gentlemen! The crown placed on the winner’s head is not to applaud her beauty. But her winning ways.