Oh beauty! What-a-beauty! Her glance and my eyes are glued. She can just not shed beauty in the last of her sneezes. How captivating, ma cherie! You, the mistress of quagmire heartlands of unnerving grandeur in the most fickle moments, only you have the right to be. For the rest, there are niches to hide their mediocre chiselled yellow stones. Since a few days, all my stares and attention focused on a certain cat lover lady just gasp out the above mentioned. But then I slyly lowermy gaze and scan my own arena. Pha! It shames me to possess something so imperfect, tanned uneven and worse, speckled with hair on various mounds and corners. Then it sorta rings clear, to be beauty, to be pretty, to be clean, to be hairless to your toe nail, is just my aspiration indeed, subconsciously though.
While last week I was hurling bollocks at cruel men and still settling from the mustard brown self peering out of the mirror, reflecting Kerala earth colors, it suddenly struck, the Susheela Raman chant:
Woman, where’s your dignity?
How can you lie there while the lover destroys you?
He doesn’t know your worth
But you bear his burden and make it yours
Why do you cry?
Woman, don’t be tortured by a madman
You’ve got to get out
The prison door is open
Woman, why do you rest here?
Is your love an ignorant sacrifice?
Roles you learned to play
Conspire against you and hold you down
Why don’t you fight...
Though, mine was a different plea, almost exasperated. Woman, why do you shed so much hair? Is it not a beautiful part of you? Why does it belittle you so much, the same tentacle that is a man's pride? Why do you pour hot wax or take big sharp knives and wage a war on your poor body? Is it so hideous? And then it struck that romantic pleas won't affect the trend. One should rationally reason it. This all started with Binoo K. John's book "Entry from Backside only". While Mr. John very comfortably rants away on how subverted Indian English is hilarious to its guts, he gets muddled up with his liberat-ist stance. He was talking about a certain beauty parlor advert. reading "full arm leg wax..." etc and just to point out some apparent rib tickling humor streak he says (sic)"... this is supposed to be an advert for some place where bear-skinned women go to..."
Hence started the boggling of mind. How dare you! You, o bearer of long,short, dark, coarse, smooth, curly,straight,waves,curls and stubbles springing from every nano inch of your masculine physical space, dare even notice my little strands of visible black protein! And then, further started a humanistic inquiry in it. To think of, when a person failing any apparent medical reason, just goes and pours hot wax on one's body, trust me it hurts. And worse, when you pull out every strand of hair, it hurts even more. This is only to drive home the point that "hysteria", a literal madness surrounds a female mind when it comes to things like "perception of beauty", "Self image", "acceptance/love" etc.
Such beauty treatments are only one aspect of this whole purple painting. Same happens with the much cliched ms. universe shite. Why on earth would anyone give a shit about a woman who starves herself to death, gets 16 people to comb her hair, applies all sorts of chemicals to hide natural processes that her biological body has to go through, wears clothes to reveal enough and hide something (not like no one knows beneath)? Moreover, woman, who decides if you are pretty enough, why do you constantly want to be assured of it, why does the thought itself of a beautiful body that should please other eyes, excite you so much? What is this desire to be so pretty, so clean and perhaps, so globally commonly mad?
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