The Barbie is 50!

Caution! This is a bit serious!
It was Sir Thomas Overbury who first derided beauty in the following words: "All the carnal beauty of my wife is but skin deep." Everyone knows that it is a highly perishable human aspect. Viewed in this context, it is incredible that a thing of beauty has held the world totally captive for 50 years in some 150 countries! I refer to the Barbie Doll which is turning 50 this month and its makers Mattel claim that three Barbie dolls are sold every second! The total number has already crossed a billion!

I am sure that many a crying child was pacified and made to smile with a Barbie Doll and it’s parallel could be seen only in Woodward’s Gripe Water. Remember the famous advertisement where an anxious grandmother asks her daughter, ‘Ennachu?’ (What happened?) and her tense daughter replies ‘Kuzhandai azhududhu!’ (The child cried). A beaming grandma prescribes to her daughter to give the child Woodward’s Gripe Water as she always did in the past when her own daughter was a child. This ad could as well be true of Barbie Doll!

To commemorate the 50 years’ of Barbie Doll, its Indian makers have decided to give the doll the faces of Bollywood celebrities, the first being Katrina Kaif. I agree that this is a sound business decision as Katrina Kaif is a doll that everyone would like to have but that is not my point. It was over a decade back that the Indian market opened up to the West and the sheer population of the country with its mega buying power particularly in the consumer market made every manufacturer rush to tap the potential here. The real invasion came from the manufacturers of cosmetics and beauty aids. They knew that there was a huge vulnerable population of young girls who could be lured into buying all their trash. They generated tremendous interest in our girls by awarding International beauty awards to our women year after year. Sushmita Sens, Aishwaryas and the like became icons overnight. The exploitation of the country’s youth started and goes on relentlessly.

To show you how vulnerable our youth can be to the power of advertisements, a lawsuit has come up last week in an Indian Court against a Perfume manufacturer. This perfume is known for its blatant ads showing how women swoon over each other when a man using this perfume walks the street. It is an insult to women too. A young man using this perfume for over a year has now filed a suit saying that not a single girl even turned her head towards him, let alone swoon over him and the Court has admitted the suit!

Looking at all the din made by cosmetic manufacturers, we are led to think that all the girls just want to look stunning and nothing else! This is a very disturbing trend. Should women be so obsessed with beauty? I had once listened to Kiran Mazumdar Shaw, CMD of Biocon, on NDTV. She is incidentally one of the top ten richest women of India according to Forbes. In that interview, Kiran Mazumdar tells about the difficulties she faced with the steep gender barrier and how she started Biocon - in a garage in 1978. In thirty years, it has made her a billionaire and the country’s most talked about woman entrepreneur! Look at Indra Nooyi handling the affairs of Pepsi with such consummate ease! Why can’t Barbie select one of them as models? The answer is simple. To look like Indra Nooyi or Kiran Mazumdar, you don’t need expensive cosmetics and where will the manufacturers go if you stop using them?!
Listen to Khalil Gibran on ‘Beauty’:

Beauty is not the image you would see nor the song you would hear,
But rather an image you see though you close your eyes and a song you hear though you shut your ears.
It is not the sap within the furrowed bark, nor a wing attached to a claw,
But rather a garden forever in bloom and a flock of angels for ever in flight.

People of Orphalese, beauty is life when life unveils her holy face
But you are life and you are the veil.
Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror.
But you are eternity and you are the mirror.

Barbie is just a doll that never ages! If it ages, it would have become as gruesome as The Picture of Dorian Gray by now!

 

My dear AbhiSing
I stand corrected. Barbie's birthday is March 9th indeed! I got carried away by the news of Katrina modelling for Barbie and this news item was dated 20th November! Anyway, I got a chance to share my views about Barbie and how this coveted doll was setting up wrong standards for the youth. My senility!
I just read your thread wishing Barbie happy birthday. A nice tribute to a disproportionately charming doll!
Sri

 

My dear Mindi
I must start my reply to you with my admiration for your signature line but then I somehow have this vision of you exercising caution even from your childhood!

Viji must be AbhiSing. I never knew that! Yes. I made a beeline to her thread and found it to be a good, informative one. Barbie looks more attractive through her deft handling! I have only tried to caution people that beauty is not the 'be all, end all' parameter of human existence. Whenever I see a matrimonial ad in which the man stipulates beauty as the major criteria of selection, I feel appalled. I can't help thinking how shallow people can be!

I am all for Katrina Kaif as the model for Barbie. No one can look dumber than her! And what is beauty unless she is dumb?
Sri

 

My dear Mindi
You may be so transparent or I may be a good judge of people but I must say this of you. No one in IL has a more appropriate Avatar than you. That makes judging you absolutely simple! You have a disarmingly childlike disposition that is so very endearing about you!
Sri

 

Dear Radha
I do not like 100 year old ladies looking like a just born! If Barbie is 100, she must try to look like Mother Teresa. She is not a Markandeya or Dhruva to be eternally young! Looks must be befitting the age.

Now you have touched a very soft chord in my memory by mentioning Madhubala. Like Meenakumari, she was another tragic heroine of Hindi films. Her beauty was out of the world.

It is strange that boys don't play with Barbies when they are too young and Barbies are all they want when they get older!
sri