Missing The Point

Our Miss India is prettying up for the parade. "I never thought of quitting," Shruti Sharma told Outlook, "I was safe, there was no danger to us, so why should I quit?" But hadn’t more than 200 people died in Nigeria in rioting over the contest? "That had nothing to do with the Miss World pageant. Riots keep happening in so many parts of the world," she says.

Shruti, the girl from New Delhi who has been knocking at glamour’s doors these past four years and is now on the springboard of her life, is thinking herself, not politics. "I’m very optimistic about myself," she says, sounding more Miss World-hopeful like. "Start a chain of restaurants, Bollywood probably, there are so many things I want to do." December 7 should tell her how big she should really think. Until then, "I’m enjoying myself, such a wonderful experience, I’m meeting so many girls, I love being a part of all this..."

But all this is going nowhere. Not even in London where the organisers have been scrambling for a venue to hold the event, and not finding anything half-suitable. After some early anger in the press—"These girls will be wearing swimwear dripping with blood," writer Muriel Gray told The Guardian—the media has agreed to pretend it’s not happening. Not even Channel 5.

And why London. It seems the world has no place for Miss World any more. A man who answered the phone at the Miss World office in London was taken aback when asked where the contest will go from London after this event. It’ll be enough if they have this one out of the way.

These have been dreams dished out to the developing world. It came back to Britain for the event at the Millennium Dome, but that was an Indian event in London. That Channel 5 broadcast it then but now sees it as an aberration. This second go in London is an unrecorded accident. The last obituaries noted that Miss World is homeless, all dressed up (if dressing up is what it is) and nowhere to go. The developed world had forgotten, and now the developing world is forgetting.

And the obits took note of the striking cause for the end. That this time Islamic fundamentalists and militant feminists have been on the same side. And that the Islamists have achieved what the feminists never could. Gray has the last word. The events in Nigeria "highlight that misogyny exists on every level: from the Sharia laws of the fundamentalists, down to the so-called civilised West, which didn’t protest over the treatment of Amina Lawal and is now agreeing to host this spectacle." If invisible locating can be called hosting, that is. Our national Miss is quite cut off from the world.