Having established her intellectual credentials (idealistic Wellesley student, aspiring investment banker), she drops a two-tonne brick with her description of the contestants’ behaviour as "psychoticness". Indeed, and what better reason to put the book down and head directly for something intellectually unpretentious, like beer?
It isn’t helped by the feeble throw in the general direction of roman a clef stylistics. It isn’t particularly challenging to figure out who Meeta Sengupta (Sushmita Sen), Alisha Ray (Aishwarya Rai), Mamta Sindhu (Madhu Sapre), Donald Singh (Mickey Mehta), or Promod Kakre (Prahlad Kakkar) are inspired by. But where is the value in the exercise when it seems to have been carried out more with a fearful eye on libel laws than on making some sort of point, any point? After all, with the exception of the rather glacially beautiful Ms Rai, the real-life figures have done enough (did she/didn’t she boob jobs, the middle-class nirvana of a sexy foreign husband, general entertaining outrageousness) to make them ripe for sharp observation.
To be fair, Trivedi does hit her straps on occasion. There’s a letter-perfect analysis of the social phenomenon known as South Bombay: "...the suburbs...looked upon with disdain by the smug inhabitants of South Bombay.... In their high-rise buildings, moist with age, these people have earned their money the old-fashioned way—they’ve inherited it."
Bitchiness works only when it’s backed by such accurate observation. Trivedi’s take on what a society girl from Delhi can hope to take away from a beauty queen’s tiara is cruelly satisfying: "I envisaged her lying in a pastel-coloured silk robe on a king-sized bed (in an ostentatious house) filing her perfectly manicured nails while gossiping with her girlfriends, waiting for her troll-like noveau riche husband to come home."
But these are just set pieces. Trivedi has the observation, but is consistently let down by her inability to do anything interesting with them. Perhaps the most egregious example is where she attempts to analyse the old saw about the disproportionate success of girls from services families in Indian beauty pageants. This is verifiably true, and there are several reasons, but Trivedi loses both the plot and the attention of any reader seeking entertainment when she typecasts a group of people some 3-million strong (forces’ staff and their kin) as being part of "...the festive and rather jovial milieu of the army community." Oh dear.
Trivedi doesn’t miss any opportunity to emphasise another, subtler cliche. Like Trivedi herself, her character studies economics at an elite US college, and she uses this variously as a basis for claiming kinship with a contest judge remarkably like Anand Mahindra and for justifying her attempts at economic analysis of the beauty business. Why would anyone want to trumpet such credentials in an age where the world’s most well-known double Ivy League graduate is a certain George W. Bush? In any case, her idealism, which she claims somehow kept the notion of the contest pure, ultimately lets Trivedi down, because in examining the detail of beauty contest-related brand tie-ins, she often misses the big picture. Beauty contests are primarily mass media spectacles; they are just one of several ways to deliver a large audience to interested advertisers.
The large audiences in question are in the developing world, and even they are showing signs of moving to other, more commercially promising media avenues, reality shows being not least among them. Lots of money on offer, public pain and humiliation, the desperation of oestrogen- (and testosterone-) fuelled insecurities, glamour, sex appeal, rumours of skulduggery by the organisers and sponsors; these are no longer unique to the traditional beauty contest.
It’s a pity Trivedi only barely explores the idea of such contests, and an even greater pity that she doesn’t really get her claws out. She could clearly have done with criticism of her manuscript a la Thomas Beecham; the great classical conductor once floored a troublesome cellist with, "Madam, you have between your legs an instrument capable of giving great pleasure to thousands—and all you can do is bloody scratch it!"‘Psychoticness’, certainly, but entirely fitting for an opportunity missed.
