Courtesy - Indian Express |
Why just America, beauty pageants across the world are dull! I can’t remember the last time I sat through one.
In India the reaction to Ms Davuluri’s historic win came in stages. It began as a trickle of self-congratulatory posts on social media for sharing the same gene pool as the first made in India, Miss USA. A few hours later it turned into a tsunami of outrage after BuzzFeed shared a tirade of racist tweets directed at Ms Davuluri. It did shock a lot of us that the world’s most powerful nation had citizens with Geography so poor that they couldn’t differentiate an Indian from an Arab and had heaped unflattering epithets like Ms Al Qaeda on her!
Interestingly, a lot of us returned the favour in equal measure as we went around dissing America as a nation of dumb racists.
It was convenient for us to ignore the fact that there will be as many opinions as there are people and if you go looking for ugly underbelly kind of stuff, there are people who will collate and find it for you. So, why get upset over the riff-raff that is carefully screened and used as proof to dump on the whole nation! If a set of Americans found it impossible to accept that an immigrant was chosen as America’s most beautiful, there was also the panel of judges and audience that selected her to represent first New York and then their nation internationally!
Just like no single template can be used to describe a diverse culture like India, we cannot paint the world’s third most populous nation with the same brush.