Features: Magazine | Literary Review | Life | Metro Plus | Open Page | Education Plus | Book Review | Business | SciTech | Friday Review | Cinema Plus | Young World | Property Plus | Quest | Folio |

Mureen Wadia

Spurring them on to glamour and modelling, post-marriage and babies, is Maureen. Bombay Dyeing Gladrags Mrs India is into its seventh year now. “When I looked around, I found married women were off the glamour shelf. They were forced to be Page 3 personalities. Page 3 is passé,” declares Maureen, explaining the idea behind the Mrs India contest. “The idea is not to turn these women into Bollywood or Balaji heroines. But to help them live life with renewed confidence and vivaciousness,” she says.

But the 25 married women who will vie for the Mrs India 2008 later this year will have to subscribe to the clichéd pre-requisites. In the contest, touted to be a chance for all on the wrong side of 25, “to be a girl again”, the contestants are expected to be “glamorous,” “attractive,” “vivacious” married women with a “pleasing personality” to boot.

Maureen says, post-contest, the women “go back” and “re-adjust” to home life.

“I give them a lot of grounding, a lot of emotional nutrients. The idea is to make them strong,” she says.

Mrs World will this year pick contestants from smaller cities in Orissa and Rajasthan as well as from Shillong, Darjeeling and Kanpur. “In a way, the husbands of women from smaller cities are more supportive. Men in the metros are a little intimidated by women,” observes Maureen. But she vouches things have turned for the better in the past few years.

“Men do not want their wives to be a trophy anymore,” says Maureen.

P. ANIMA

Printer friendly page  
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

---

---