The Mrs Sri Lanka 2021 pageant was ugly. The event was ugly. The women who took centre stage were ugly. Why? Because beauty as they say radiates fromwithin and what manifested on stage was unadulterated ugliness.
It’s only Monday still. But the nation is obsessing with the show. After a week laced with toxic coconut oil and toxic dhal, the spectacle of a catfight by a mediocre act was like rain falling on parched earth. SriLankans were soaking up social media video clips of a gob smacked Mrs Sri Lanka, let’s call her the winner for now until she sorts out the legalities as claimed by her, clinging on to her crown while an immediate pastMrs Sri Lanka is seen yanking away at it. Storming onto the stage is a beauty queen from the past and together they dethrone and banish Mrs Sri Lanka off stage and plonk the disputed crown on the head of another contestant who dissolves into tears. Beauty queen from the past shoves her fist in the air in a gesture of comradeship, adding ignominy to insult for that school of political thought. As for the backstage act, one can only imagine that it must have been nothing short of colourful. Meanwhile, a voyeuristic audience claps and cheers. Were there boos and jeerstoo?
While beauty queen’s past and immediate past are brow beating the hell out of another woman, womens’activists are breast beating and bemoaning the futility of their efforts at empowerment. What empowerment? Of Sri Lankan women being able to take part in abeauty contest? If so the threshold is a primitive one for a country which produced the world’s first woman prime minister. For now, let’s leave aside facts such as the under representation of women in public service, even gripes about glass ceilings.
Meanwhile the thinking caps have come on and pseudo judges and jury are examining the surrounding evidence.
Is the winner a Miss or Mrs?
The plot thickens. The conundrum is whether the winner is a married Mrs, a divorced Mrs or a divorced Miss or is she somewhere in transition as a separated Mrs or Miss.
Then again, this need not have been a conundrum if the contestant’s marital status had been clarified during the qualifying stages. Unless this was not possible because of the perennial, all- pervasive political interferenceabout which the whispers are becoming louder and louder. It is difficult to believe that the two beautyqueens would have succumbed easily to a political heavy hand given what they did.
Maybe the whole episode was meant to be what it was. An act.
So what does all this make beauty queen’s past and immediate past? Heroines, purveyors of justice, moral crusaders or simply two bullies who spotted an opportunity to reclaim momentarily their fading limelight at the expense of the humiliation of another woman?
The jury is out that these two women should be sent to their own finishing school to learn the A, B, C of decorum. To say the least!
The criterion for the next Mrs Sri Lanka should be the need for enduring beauty on the inside and beauty on the outside. This way we can ensure that beauty queens will be women who fix each other’s crowns and not rip off their reign.
Mrs Sri Lanka 2021 should be cancelled.
