Everyone's a masked beauty

In Satyam Shivam Sundaram a Raj Kapoor production of 1978 Rajesh Shashi Kapoor chances upon Roopa Zeenat Aman a village belle whose dulcet singing and voluptuous body sparks in him an irrepressible urge for her Rajesh is oblivious of the disfigured side of her face always concealed from him by her pallu The truth about Roopas face is revealed to Rajesh on their nuptial night ndash he is repulsedIn the end though Rajesh grasps that the true meaning of a persons beauty is in the magnificence of his or her spirit which should be admired over what is skindeep the film suggests Lavishly mounted and erotic the film flopped Perhaps the audience could not accept that Roopas disfigurement remained invisible to Rajesh through their dallianceImagine a Satyam Shivam Sundaram remake frame by frame in 2020 Its makers will not have to resort to the dubious artifice of using Roopas pallu or the darkness of the night to conceal her scarred face They would get her to don the mask we see people wear today in the hope of keeping at bay the novel Coronavirus which preys upon the beautiful and the ordinary alikeThe mask is now the face which hints at who we are It is the face we meet first That is why all of us tend to prepare a face to meet the faces that we meet Our initial impression of a person is through his or her face and then slowly his or her subordinate identities of class caste religion etc are revealed to us So also is disclosed to us with time the persons inner being which can become an enchanting saga of discoveryThe face is now masked depriving us of clues to who people are The mask will efface to a great degree the significance of looks It will compel us to search in people in the manner of Satyam Shivam Sundarams Rajesh the beauty in them beyond their body Physical beauty will be camouflaged Our facial uniqueness will be concealed under the sameness of masksThis sameness will threaten to undermine the 500billion cosmetics industry as beauty cannot preen and the ordinary will find little need for a facial boost Challenged will be the Lipstick Effect which says people shift their expenditure from luxury goods to lipsticks during a crisis No point applying lipstick behind the mask No one will see your lips and even you will discover once you take off the mask that the lipstick has been smudgedThe mask will deny to beauty the premium it is supposed to command at workplace and insulate plain looks from the penalty these supposedly incur Attractive people are said to produce better business outcomes suggested Daniel S Hamermesh and Jeff E Biddle who studied the labour market in 1993 They famously concluded The penalty for plainness at workplace is 5 to 10 per cent slightly larger than the premium for beauty The effects are slightly larger for men than womenBeauty accounted for differential payments even in 2016 In that year Jaclyn S Wong and Andrew M Penner claimed that attractive individuals earn roughly 20 percent more than people of average attractiveness but this gap is reduced when controlling for grooming dressing up for instance suggesting that the beauty premium can be actively cultivatedA more recent finding is that attractive women run the risk of suffering penalties at workplace Stefanie K Johnson of the London School of Economics pointed out in a blog based on a research study she and three others undertook that attractive women may not be assigned jobs deemed masculine or could get perceived as femmes fatales and therefore considered untrustworthy or face retaliation on the presumption that their careers have flourished because they are showstoppersFor employees attractive or otherwise the mask could reduce the incidence of discrimination at workplace Might we then celebrate the mask Some Muslims are tickled by the thought that the novel Coronavirus has compelled critics of the burqa to wear the mask They obviously gloss over the fact that even though the Islamic injunction on purdah applies only to women even Muslim men have had to don the mask which is undoubtedly discomfiting because the wearer has to continuously breathe in the exhaled air Their experience will hopefully have them liberate women from the burqaIn Pandemic Covid19 shakes the world Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Aringfrac12iAringfrac34ek writes If in the Cold War the rule of survival was MAD Mutually Assured Destruction now it is another MAD ndash mutually assured distance The mask may merge the attractive and unattractive in the staid sameness of fabric but it also ensures that an accidental proximity between two people would not lead to them falling ill The individual has been subordinated to the collective fear to its universality of which the most eloquent symbol is the mask which has already started to sell under prestigious brands establishing the faceless wearers exclusivity The novel Coronavirus clearly has failed to smother class vanityThe writer is a senior journalistSend your feedback to mailbagmiddaycomThe views 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