Once upon a time little girls had the Cinderella dream, the one which usually ended with Prince Charming on the proverbial white horse. That became old hat a while ago, li'l girls began wearing tiaras cut out of cardboard, posing in front of mirrors as beauty queens and rehearsing their acceptance speeches.
Last weekend Kochi played host to yet another beauty pageant, the Hairomax Miss South India contest and the ‘whole of South India' got three more beauty queens. And three girls got to say their speeches.
Shubha Phutela of Karnataka was crowned Hairomax Miss South India, the first and second runners-up were Geethu Christy and Nikitha Narayan of Kerala and Andhra Pradesh respectively. Winning a pageant or this pageant for that matter was easy for the girls, given that beauty pageants are fast becoming a cottage industry.
Stepping stone
Shubha has won a couple of beauty pageants in Bengaluru where she is based, but she considers ‘this one a stepping stone to bigger things'. The Miss South India pageant, ironically, went to a Punjabi. The soft-spoken engineering student, all of 21, has lived in ‘South India', “I consider myself more of a South Indian because I have been living here all these years. You can be born in a place and still not belong, I belong to Bengaluru.” Then again, there are no rules that disqualify those who are not of pucca ‘South Indian' origins.
Says Ajith Pegasus, who organised and directed the event, “we conducted auditions for the contestants from the four southern States. We had no hard and fast rules that the participants had to be of ‘south Indian' origins. What about all those athletes of Indian origin who compete against India?”
The first runner-up, Geethu Christy of Thiruvananthapuram, is a veteran of sorts of the beauty pageant circuit. She was also the Vivel Miss Kerala first runner up. How does she feel about the ‘always-the-bridesmaid-but-never-the-bride' jinx? “If I won the crown, I would probably rest on my laurels and not strive hard for the next win. Maybe God wants me to keep trying harder for something better,” she philosophises. After all practise does make perfect. The management student is all upbeat about the win, and what she liked about the pageant she says, was getting to know girls from other parts of the country.
Nikitha Narayan from Hyderabad has been modelling for a while. She started when she was ten. She appeared in a commercial for Annapoorna Iodised salt, directed by Rajeev Menon. And later she even appeared in a commercial for Fair and Lovely with Trisha. With six more months to go to complete her management course, her focus is on her education for the time being. After that it is that inevitable - the movies ‘as a kind of testing of waters'. This does not mean film offers from the Telugu industry haven't come her way, but Nikitha is in no rush to grab the first thing called a movie offer that comes her way. Same goes for Geethu who is being careful and ‘choosy about film roles, after all it will be my first film.'
This was one beauty pageant with a conscience - some of the proceeds from the event went towards sponsoring heart surgeries for two children.
