What makes beautiful women beautiful?

It was a typically American marketing trick when Vogue magazine described Leela Naidu as one of the world’s ten most beautiful women. As if there is an endoscope that will measure the specific gravity of beauty. It’s like Time magazine, another gimmickry specialist, publishing lists of “tomorrow’s Asian leaders”. Some of them end up in prison for misdemeanour, but Time gets its mileage from the thousands of Indians who lap up the lists with colonial loyalty.

Leela Naidu was of course an extraordinarily beautiful woman. It was not the Aishwarya Rai kind of beauty. Its brilliance was not wholly, or even mainly, physical. It emanated from, and was embellished by the beauty of an active, comprehending mind. That was what made Maharani Gayatri Devi beautiful even at 90. That’s what makes Nandita Das, or Arundati Roy, or Mallika Sarabhai stand out in a crowd. That – and not Mallika Sharawat – is the reason for the poetic proclamation that “beauty is truth, and truth beauty”. The best of them know that what they are born with must make them grateful, not boastful.

How ironic that Gayatri Devi was also in that fateful Vogue list. She passed away within 24 hours of Leela’s passing. Gayatri Devi’s grace and class put her in the classic realm, perhaps with Cleopatra and Anarkali. The strength of her character laminated the nobility of her bearing, leading to massive electoral majorities. Which was unacceptable to Indira Gandhi. She sought not only the imprisonment but also the humiliation of the woman who dared to challenge her. The Maharani was lodged in a Tihar cell along with street women and leprosy patients. Hell has no fury like a woman scorned.

Like Gayatri Devi, Leela Naidu was aware, but not vain, about her beauty. Her intellectual sensibilities were well enough honed for her to distinguish between the ephemeral and the abiding. She was very much a thinking beauty. She imbibed the nuances of European aesthetics from her mother and, from her father, the resolve to stand up for her values.

Her personal life was a continuous tragedy – two failed marriages, twin daughters gone astray, grievous illnesses, loneliness. She longed for love and didn’t get it. She developed angularities, shifting moods. There was no family to turn to. Her only solace was the memory of her father whom she revered.

It’s a pity that India knows little about Ramaiya Naidu, a pioneering scientist and a staunch nationalist. He opposed colonialism so strongly that he refused to study in the premier colleges of the day because they were all British-founded. He preferred Shantiniketan and Banares Hindu University, and actively supported Krishnamurthy’s Rishi Valley school. He declined scholarships offered by famous British universities and went instead to Paris for his PhDs. Specialising in ionization under Madame Curie, he became a founding father of the Tata cancer hospital in Bombay. At one point, radiation incapacitated him and he was forced to give up cancer-related work.

It was routine for Leela to go teary-eyed and lump-throated whenever a reference to her father came up. Leela was enormously talented, but her creativity was never funnelled into works of her own. It was utilised in movies others made or books others wrote; as Dom Moraes’ travel partner, she used to conduct research and even interviews for his books. Leela spread a lot of light around, though her own life was mostly spent in darkness. Suffering sometimes cleanses life, but why should people who do no harm to others suffer at all?

‘Good people’ vs liers and crooks

.


In the midst of all the religious provocations, the selfishness and the crude display of money power, there’s one positive feature in this election: A groundswell of public opinion against the vulgarity of politics.

Actually it began after the Mumbai terrorist attack when people spontaneously gathered to express their revulsion of politicians playing games with security. The politicians didn’t get the message as two incidents showed. Narendra Modi tried to score political points by attacking opponents in a speech before the Mumbai Trident Hotel and then by offering money to the police martyrs’ families who rejected it with contempt. Secondly, as if to show that politicians are the same whatever their party, Vilasrao Deshmukh visited the Taj, like a tourist enjoying the ruins, with another tourist from the film industry in tow.

In the ongoing election campaign, politicians are again taking the public for granted. Mulayam Singh distributes currency notes and says it has nothing to do with elections. Jaswant Singh also distributes 100-rupee notes and asks: “Is it wrong to give money to the poor”? The question is too contemptible to deserve an answer. But it definitely is wrong to assume that the people of this country are fools.

No wonder citizens are outraged by the calibre of candidates, the lies they tell, the double-standards of the parties and the reality that whichever party wins, it will be a victory for hypocrisy. That’s why a number of optimistic initiatives have been launched by individuals and groups.

At one level, actor Amir Khan is leading an awareness campaign with the slogan “Vote for good people”. At another level, good people like Mallika Sarabhai, Capt. G.R.Gopinath and Meera Sanyal, head of the India Operations of the ABN-Amro Bank, are standing as independents. Mona Shah, an ophthalmic surgeon, is the candidate of the Professionals Party of India in South Mumbai. In Andhra, the Lok Satta Party has fielded educated, worthy candidates for all 42 Lok Sabha and most of the 294 Assembly seats.

These men and women may not win this time around. That’s fine. That’s part of being nonviolent in the battles of democracy. History’s first people’s action victory was in the French Revolution, one of the most violent on record. Violent student power also succeeded in changing the course of history in Thailand and Indonesia in the second half of the 20th Century.

The most dramatic assertion of people power was in the Philiphines in 1986, and that turned out to be nonviolent. The massing of hundreds of thousands of protesting citizens on a Manila highway was enough to drive President Ferdinand Marcos into exile and enthrone the widow of the assassinated hero, Benigno Aquino.

We cannot afford to be violent in our campaign for change. The main reason is that any eruption of violence is likely to take on a religious character and that would be suicidal. This is not 1977 when an Emergency-wounded people yearned for change and Jayaprakash Narayan rose to the occasion.

Today’s leaders are petty people. They cannot think beyond dynastic controls on the one hand, and communal divisiveness on the other. The change we want must start with changing them. That is why the fight being put up by independents and idealistic groups is a sign of hope. The good candidates may not win, but they will take the movement for decency one step forward, and force the crooks and the goons to go one step back. That will be gain enough.
.