Valhalla Of The Vanities

Want a bigger penis? Hollow cheeks? Slimmer waist? Flatter stomach? Fuller bums andbreasts? Shapelier thighs? A new nose or face, maybe? And while we're on the subject, wantto be Kamala instead of Kamal, Bimal instead of Bimla? No problem at all. You can buyeverything these days: new buttocks, breasts, bellies, chins, cheeks…even genders.

Welcome to the new Valhalla of the Vanities. Where shops style themselves as clinics,salesmen as doctors. In upmarket marble and chrome designer shops, cosmetic surgeons,Doctor Divines in Rohit Bal suits and Reena Dhaka sarees, play God. Cater to every secretfantasy: liposuck the lrd, rhinoplast the nose, orthodont the teeth, dimplify the smile,dermobrase the skin, paddy plant the pate, penile implant the penis, brachoplast the arms,brephloplast the eyes, contour the curves, V line the A line, refashion the face. Midwifeyour rebirth, orchestrate your regression from ugly senescence to youthful efflorescence.

Hippocrates who? This breed swears by the Mammon Manifesto. The monies are big andcompetition fierce in this fast expanding market that trades in hope and beauty. Thenumbers reflect that: cosmetic surgery constitutes 20 to 50 per cent of plastic surgeon'spractice today, up from 15 50 20 per cent a decade ago. More than 450 practising cosmeticsurgeons countrywide against a meagre 180 just three years ago. Each one of them exudingunabashed hubris. "Cosmetic surgeons, accept it," drawls Narendra Pandya,hotshot Bombay-based surgeon patronised by sex symbols and starlets, "can improveupon what God has given."

Those improvements don't come cheap. New noses for Rs 8,000 to 25,000, breasts for Rs25,000 to Rs 60,000, trim bum and tum for Rs 10,000 to Rs 35,000, arms for Rs 10,000 to Rs20,000, faces for Rs 25,000 to Rs 75,000, smiles for Rs 10,000 to Rs 40,000, penises for1.5 lakh to Rs 2 lakh, sexes for Rs 1 lakh 1.5 lakh. Rates re arbitrary in a seller'smarket. What you CAN rather than what you SHOULD pay decides the amount payable.Delhi-based Shahim Nooryezedan, leading light of this mercenary medical brigade, describesthe modus operandi: "The price is determined the minute the client walks in throughthe door. How he looks, talks; it's a skill you perfect with practice. You assess how muchyou can get away with. Will he be shocked if you say 25 k or will he say, 'Is thatall?"

Not exploitative. Merely expedient. That's how they see it. Delhi-based Dr ShashiBhushan Gogia, whose clientele includes Rajendra Nagar socialites and starlet Somy Ali,offers a justification a dozen leading surgeons agree with: "there's no relationshipbetween cost to seller and cost to buyer. You're putting a price on insecurity. Thesepeople-are not patients. They're not unhealthy. It's up to the doctor to extort what hecan." With a clean conscience. Like Nooryezedan: "I help fix Zee anchorwomanPinky Iran's nose, she signs a new programme, a modelling contract. A model gets Rs 5,000to Rs 15,000 a picture because she once paid Rs 25,000 to get a nose worth photographing.She makes money on that nose repeatedly. Why shouldn't we?" He argues, "Can youput a price on a skill? Can you put a price on a painting?"

The avuncular Suresh Gupta, acknowledged as Delhi's sultan of the scalpel, offers hisown rationale: "these are the people choking the gold and diamond shops of the city.Buying baubles that make them look and feel better. What we offer makes them feel betterthan anything else, has more value than anything money can buy. Naturally, that costsmoney." Money they are more than willing to milk from clients whom one of them refersto, strictly off the record, as being "fat, dumb and happy". Nooryezedan is lesstactful: "People are making silly money. And willing to spend it o the fashion of themoment. These days it happens to be cosmetic surgery.

Not fashion alone. For some it's a matter of compulsion. "These are people",says fashion designer David Abraham, "trapped by their image." Career-driven,image-conscious filmstars and models, television's prima donnas, dancers and designers,celebrities and socialites are the traditional constituency of the cosmetic surgeon whohelps them preserve the youth, beauty and glamour that translates into charisma and cash.

Hence the long line of supplicants outside the offices of Pandya (sobriquet: Starsurgeon/Surgeon since he 'does' most film stars) and company. Though no one will go onrecord to confirm, the grapevine says it all. Dimple Kapadia gets her post-pregnancystretchmarks erased so she can flash a sexy navel in Saagar, Hema Malini getsherself liposucked all over to get her body contoured to Dream Girl proportions, Sridevigets her nose fixed and spindles sucked, Somy Ali gets her thighs trimmed. Jeetendra'syouthfulness surgeon's ascribe less to Thirty Plus, more to the three-plus facelifts he'srumoured to have had already. Dev Anand allegedly has one every five years. That sexyMadhuri Dixit smile that singes 950 million hearts a day is no gift of the divine but oforthodontic design. Designer: Dr sunil Bhoolabhai of Bombay. Method: cosmetic fillings.Charges: Rs 10,000 to Rs 20,000 a session. Miss World Rai apparently paid s 50,000 for apearlier set of teeth. Former Miss India, Namrata Shirodkar paid about the same for hergum trim job.

Meanwhile, Delhi's cocktail circuit is abuzz with rumours of a high profile televisionanchorwoman getting a facelift abroad. Wags offer her prolonged disappearance from theprogramme and the party circuit as clinching proof. Delhi socialite Kamna Prasad's andShahnaz Hussain’s sahibzada’s nose jobs, the phoren facelift of a prominentindustrialist’s wife, her second in 40-odd years, is the very stuff of societygossip. Dancer Sonal Mansingh is alleged to have had her eye-bags excised after criticsstarted carping her khandita nayika was looking more demolished than distraught onstage.And Delhi fashion designer Jattin Kochhar’s nose  job has become something of acause celebre with the clothes designer trading charges in the press with his nosedesigner (see box) in the wake of the surgery going awry.

The web of vanities expands relentlessly. The latest addition to the Beauty HuntersBrigade are the corporate TNC types. "Superficials help. Packaging counts. In aget-ahead corporate environment, anything that gives you an edge over the other guyhelps," explains Abraham. Not company executives alone, even CEOs need that crutch."In this Age of Hype company issues only look as good as company chairmen do,"quips Abraham wryly. Which explains a private airline CEO’s decision to get hisprominently Parsi nose fixed. A trifle inexplicable though is the decision of an ageing,politically well-connected, gargantuan god-woman to get herself liposucked in London andgetting almost totally paralysed in the process. But then in these consumerist times evengodliness is about glitziness.

Cinema and corporate gods, spiritual and sex symbols, media and megabuck moguls are notthe only people starring in this story about the breathless quest for youth and beauty.It’s a story with a sweeping canvas: with the cast of characters exploding, everexpanding to include dhobis and clerks, seamstresses and salesmen, husbands and hausfraus,dowagers and debutantes. Gogia’s most recent client was his washerman’sprospective daughter- in - law. "He wanted her nose fixed before she married into thefamily," he says. The Gogia washerman is exemplar of a sea change in attitude. Of theway, we, as a people, have begun to image ourselves.

When did a people who always revered age, scorned youth with all its promise of  glamour and beauty as maya,/i>, illusion, develop this pathology about age andappearance? "Ten years ago," asserts Dr R.J. Maneksha, Bombay-based plasticsurgeon," in the wake of the media, satellite explosion. People began aspiring toconform to the images of perfection and beauty they saw on television. Shows of the OprahWinfrey and Donahue genre disseminated awareness about the realms of the possible."Pandya, Gogia, Gupta: each one of them narrate revelatory anecdotes about clients who comefor first visits clutching pictures of Sunny Deol and Sanjay Dutt,  Madhuri Dixit andMadhubala, asking for "his nose", "her smile".... Articulatingexpectations it would need miracles, not medicos, to fulfil. Delhi-based Dr P.K. Talwarrecounts the hilarious instance of a wannabe hero who kept him and his nurses, scrubbedand waiting, in the operation theatre for a whole hour. One of them held a mirror as the20-year-old drew lines across his nose with one hand even as he held a photo of Sunny Deolin the other, declaring firmly that THAT was the curve of nostril he wanted. PsychoanalystMadhu Sarin sums up the phenomenon: " A ffluence and availability of technology haveenabled people who merely fantasised to go ahead and realise their fantasies."

Like the Karol Bagh housewife who suffered her too broad nose till she was 35 beforeseeking Talwar’s help to rectify it. " It’s about acquiring an externalimage in consonance with the inner image you have of yourself," explains Sarin.Pandya cites the all too poignant case of a 59-year- old who came to him for a facelift."She said she had neither the time nor the money to take care of herself. Till now.She knew she couldn’t buy back lost time; all she wanted to buy back was part of herlost self." It’s a story one hears time and again. Gupta narrates the case ofthe 55-year-old grand-mother who wanted a facelift. Questioned about her motives, she saidher husband had spent his youth earning enough to enable him to give her the house, thestatus, the educated children she could be proud of. Now she wanted to be young,beautiful—to be the wife he could be proud of." She did it for him. Iwouldn’t call her a narcissist," says the doctor. Delhi-based Dr Bimla Rajan(sobriquet: Probiscus Erase-Mus, she does the BEST noses in town) cites the case of themiddle-aged wife of a top-rung executive, the same age as her youthful looking spouse,embarrassed about making joint entries at parties where guests would enquire why shelooked tired always. Consequence: with drawal, depression, marital stress. A faceliftlater, she’s a picture of smiling confidence. "We don’t restore faces. Werestore self-esteem," asserts Rajan.

One segment that desperately seeks not only self-esteem but also matrimonialsaleability/eligibility by submitting to the transformative touch of the sorcerer’sscalpel is that of unmarried young women: despondent, rejected repeatedly as defectivegoods on the Great Indian Matrimonial Mart." They come from across the board :daughters of businessmen, bank managers, salesmen and clerks," says Talwar. Breastsare augmented, noses straightened, scars erased, faces polished, leucoderma patchescunningly grafted over, to improve the girl’s chances of winning the matrimonialsweep-stakes. "Parents don’t mind the expense," says Gogia. "To themmoney spent on doctors translates into money saved on dowries."