Brainsick Soliloquy

For those surviving moments of anxiety living among unruly trust votes and serial bomb blasts, here is some relief. Few days ago, a Malayalam television channel aired highlights of Miss Kerala 2008. Watching the performance of this line-up of malayali beauties was quite paralytic to my senses and it took me all these days to recover from the trauma.

Most of the participating women spoke Malayalam with immense difficulty and I am sure the organizers would have never considered the ability to speak Malayalam well as a criterion to qualify. The event compere, the incomparable RH herself being an exponent of the demanding art of speaking Manglish, it was no surprise that the contestants followed suit. And it is a fad these days to pretend that you do not speak your mother tongue.

To add to the insult, there was a male compere too, who for most of the time ogled lecherously at the participants and spoke English the true mallu way. He did justify his malluness by flaunting his thick mal accent, but looked more like a road-side poovalan* than an event host.

The judging panel was a bigger joke, and was a bunch of inconsequential nobodys. At the risk of exposing my ignorance I should confess that other than a Mollywood starlet, I recognized none of the ‘distinguished’ panelists. All questions that the contestants were asked was lifted right out of ‘Beauty Contest Questions for Dummies’. Of course, they never assumed that all contestants would mug up answers from the same source of reference.

So if you have been thinking of disciplining yourself by inflicting some pain on your senses, please watch clips of this famed beauty contest in YouTube. I am sure some diligent mallu would have uploaded clips for his fraternity to watch and regress into paralysis.

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* Unfortunately, the word Poovalan does not have an apt translation into any language. Literally it means rooster (poo-vaalan kozhi) and in the above context it refers to a roadside romeo.