Miss World is welcome: It’ll help expose a myth

livemint.com:

News of the Miss World beauty pageant to be held in India this year after a 27-year gap has so far evoked only muted murmurs. Maybe we are spoilt for choice with public spectacles. Back in 1996, host-city Bangalore had erupted in protests that got police onto the streets and featured self-immolation bids aimed at halting the show.

That year’s contest for this glittery crown was held amid tight security, with its swimsuit round banished to Seychelles in order to calm local sensibilities. Maybe the country at large has matured since then, a theory whose fragility is easily exposed by a random look around. Or perhaps three decades of globalization and wide access to the online world have lulled folks and diverted outrage.

We can rank all these theories by whimsy, just as we often do while picking stocks—which made Keynes liken the stock market to a beauty contest. Today, there’s a literal parallel in profits of business made off sponsored ideals of good looks. Yet, as India’s countdown begins to an event that can count the word ‘bikini’ redefined in non-nuclear terms as its biggest achievement, it’s clear that our Miss World debate was left unsettled.

Back then, as now, easily dismissed was the charge of it being some sort of cultural assault or sign of moral depravity. With eager participants, such a pageant falls afoul of neither our laws nor norms. Our democracy favours diversity in social spaces and no aspect of it should be barred on flimsy grounds.