Beauty biz in post-Cronje era

Beauty biz in post-Cronje era
Amrita Shah

Once in a while, when the phone lines are down or I need a xerox, I make a trip to the neighbourhood `business centre'. That is a fancy name for the poky single room that houses a fax, xerox machine, computer and STD booths and doubles up as a living room for the family that owns it.

The young man who sits behind the counter invariably has his eyes glued to a cricket match on the television set and, being familiar with my fickle interest in the game, insists on bringing me up to date with whatever tournament is underway. When talk of Hansie Cronje's involvement with the bookies first hit the headlines, I ribbed him about his great passion. He just shrugged and spread his hands in wry acknowledgement.

The Cronje story was, as we all know, followed by more serious allegations about Indian cricket, a scandal that grows bigger everyday. Yet when I dropped in recently to get some documents copied, I found my friend discussing a forthcoming match with his brother as avidly as ever. "You're still watching cricket?" I asked him. He looked bashful for a second. "What to do?" he said breaking into a wide grin, "Have eyes, no? Have to see."As explanations go, this one probably cut close to the truth. At least it was an honest admission. For the past few weeks I have been trying to determine how viewers are responding to the allegations about match-fixing and how this is likely to affect the popularity of the game.

And the immediate conclusion I would draw from my informal inquiries is that the effect is not yet tangible. All sorts of opinions are, of course, on offer. There are people who say they knew things were amiss all along; some cl-aim this actually added an extra element to the ga-me in that you figured out which part was fixed and which one wasn't. One gentleman even described to me a piece of sleuthing he had indulged in.

The incident involved a particular match that had ended in an unexpected, abrupt defeat. That evening, watching the news on the local channel, he found the underperforming cricketers had proceeded to shoot an advertisement the same day, leading him to suspect that the match had been deliberately thrown for a business opportunity. So certain was he that he even sent a letter to the newspapers pointing out the coincidence. Yet, had this instance or later events diminished his enthusiasm as far as watching the game was concerned? No, he said sheepishly, it hadn't.

It is a common response. In a recent magazine pol-l, 64 per cent of respondents claimed to have felt betrayed by the ma-tch-fixing accusations. Fortynine per cent admitted their interest in the game had declined as a consequence. And yet, when ask-ed, an overwhelming 80 per cent said they would be watching the forthcoming Asia Cup being held in Dhaka. Clearly, events do not have immediate consequences. Habits are hard to break. And there is still, as some have pointed out, the thrill of witnessing skill -- the `tension between bat and ball'.

Fans who would be happy to vandalise property at the prospect of an Indian defeat are not rushing out to protest. No, the reaction, it seems, would be more like a slow erosion of support. A press report claims that sales of television sets have not picked up, as they do usually in cricket season. People talk about feeling `angry' when certain cricketers appear on the screen. Increasingly, I hear the observation: `cricket is a circus nobody takes it seriously anyway.'

Happenings in the cricket field bring to mind another area where disillusionment seems to be setting in: the beauty pageant business. Remember the euphoria over Sushmita Sen and Aishwariya Rai winning their world titles? Lara Dutta's recent victory has not evoked anywhere near the same level of excitement. India seems to be turning blase, even sceptical about its beauty queens. The letters to newspapers increasingly connect India's spate of victories to its value as a market for cosmetcs. Where the beauty fatigue is most evident is in the press. `Boring', `too much', `irrelevant trivia' are some of the phrases used this time to describe the phenomenon. Is the bubble ready to burst? About time, some would say.

But before we prepare - if that is where we are headed to yank the beauty contest business off the glamour stakes and let it pass as a hand-me-down to small-town India, perhaps it would be wise to count the cost of our decade-long preoccupation.

To list the ramifications. I am no great opponent of beauty contests per se. Yet I believe, and so do many of the people I know, that the glorification of beauty contests has resulted among other things in a trivialisation of priorities, in the shaping of a new undesirable definition of self-esteem for women and given a boost to the cosmetic surgery industry.

Powerful effects these. Did we want them? Few right-minded people, I think, would answer in the affirmative.