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Twinkle Khanna aka Mrs Funnybones crafts satirical stories and funny fables when she is not running a design business, selling candles or running in circles around her small but rather odd family. She narrowly escaped a gruesome tragedy when Bollywood tried to bludgeon her brain to the size of a pea, but she ducked at the right moment and escaped miraculously unharmed; she is now a popular columnist as well and is currently in the process of creating lame jokes like ' Why do all Hindu boys worship their mother? Because their religion tells them to worship the cow.' She firmly believes that nothing in life is sacred except laughter. (Not even her name, which she is secretly trying to change to Chetali Bhagat so that her columns get made into movies.) LESS ... MORE
The pursuit of beauty has always been a royal pain in the posterior. I first made this discovery at seventeen when I wore a jersey dress embellished with gold safety pins in place of sequins, and a pair of black stilettos. Two hours later, not only did I have aching feet but when I sat down to relieve the pain, I was the recipient of a brand-new piercing. A safety pin had come undone and was stuck in my bottom.
I have spent my life collecting fractures and ligament tears the way a hobbyist collects stamps, but I gamely continued wobbling through a multitude of peep toes and slingbacks. To the extent that once while getting ready for an event, I asked our assistant for advice.
‘Zen, my ankle is still swollen, should I skip wearing heels?’
Pat came the reply, ‘Yes, it’s fine today, even the men are wearing flats.’
Considering that the men in question were not cool crossdressers, but my husband and a local politician, I remain equally baffled by her answer as my decision to go ahead and wear a pair of sparkly stilettos to that event.
Suffering for beauty probably began in 4000 BC when the first woman gazed into polished obsidian and immediately decided that whatever gifts nature had given her were simply not generous enough.
The earliest historical record of makeup comes from Egypt with eyeshadow and kohl made of lead and soot. I suppose poisoning your eyes was a small price to pay for looking like a vision.
In the 17th century, lead continued to lead the way. Ceruse, made of lead carbonite, was used to whiten the face and hide smallpox scars but it also ate away your face. Women used pork fat in the 18th century to smoothen their wayward strands. I don’t know if it charmed members of the opposite sex, but it attracted rats. The poor women had to lock their hairpieces in a cage while being trapped in one themselves.
In the 21st century, we continue to chase beauty, till we finally cross the finishing line and end up as non-biodegradable corpses. Archaeologists in the next century will dig up graves and find not just bones, but the perfectly preserved breasts and bottoms of Bollywood wives as well as all the real housewives from Matunga to Manhattan, as silicone can take over 100 years to decompose.
Beauty, though, is not an acquired penchant, but an evolutionary tool. Even babies look longer at faces that are meant to be conventionally ‘good looking’. It’s based on selecting viable mates. The same reason why peacocks have extravagant plumage. Large breasts, tiny waists in women, and symmetrical features in both genders are all signals of health and youthful fertility.
Ursula K. Le Guin once wrote, “Beauty doesn’t come free with the hormones, the way it does for the young. It has to do with who the person is.” Instead of worrying about who we are becoming as we get older, we buy into the myths pushed at us by conditioning and clever advertising. Make-up that disguises the floridness of time with the flush of youth. Freezing fat and using acid to burn skin. Punishing diets and lash extensions.
We pay heed and large amounts of cash to talented businessmen, like the silver-tongued and red-soled Christian Louboutin who said, ‘The stiletto is a feminine weapon that men just don’t have.’ A weapon that we use to stab ourselves in the foot as we wince in pain while tottering on pavements.
Heels are empowering only if you mistake altitude for attitude. If heels were truly powerful, then wouldn’t men be wearing them as well? Jeff Bezos on the cover of Time magazine in Jimmy Choo peep toes. Elon Musk driving his Tesla in Versace stilettos. Putin posing bare-chested with a hunting gun and Manolo spike heels.
We can try to forgo all aspects of the beauty game, but what do we do with the human need to be moved by beauty? The desire to grow plants that have no utility aside from deriving cheer from their coloured blooms. Gaze at starry skies and rainbows or even paint them onto our eyelids. Drown in the sound of laughter and music. Glide our fingers against silk and cashmere.
Fill the monochromatic outlines of our lives with the colours of delight.
Perhaps we need to find a beauty born of joy and not torment. A balance between conforming to conditioning and true comfort.
I may have bare clipped nails that let me type and weed and strum, but I also delight in painting my toenails.
I can no longer jam those painted toes into a pair of heels though. I have them stored for the rare occasion when insecurities win the panja match against my confidence. On every other day, I live in an array of coloured flats, my swiftly moving feet, whirling mandalas on grey roads.
I am still willing to pay the price of beauty, but no longer through the currency of pain.
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Views expressed above are the author's own.
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