Inner beauty is real beauty

IT WAS a sultry weekday afternoon 31 years ago when I met the most beautiful woman in the world.

- YOGIN DEVAN

I cannot remember exactly what day of the week it was. I do know it was a few days after Saturday, November 19, 1994, when a 21-year-old Aishwarya Rai beat 86 contestants to win the Miss World title at a glittering pageant at Sun City.

A few days after the contest, Sun International, the event's main sponsor, hosted the newly-crowned Miss World at a photo-shoot at the Wild Coast Sun Resort which three decades ago was my stamping ground.

As a journalist on the Sunday Tribune at that time, I was assigned the task of interviewing Aishwarya, not that I complained.

With photographer Puri Devjee capturing the striking and classically beautiful features of this epitome of elegance on his trusted Nikon F2, I jot down her responses to my questions.

For all of 30 minutes, | admired those large eyes, arched eyebrows, flawless skin, low hairline, full lips and exceptionally large and captivating blue-green eyes. Markedly absent in her pleasant and melodious voice was an Indian accent.

While I will always remember how mesmerised I was by Aishwarya’s natural beauty, even more etched in my memory forever will be her answer to one of the many questions that I posed.

I asked her if, like many other beauty queens such as Zeenat Aman, Meenakshi Seshadri, Juhi Chawla and Sushmita Sen, she too would use the Miss World crown as a winning ticket to Bollywood. Without batting an eyelid, she said: “No, I don’t think I would.”

She told me with a straight look that she was still bent on becoming an architect for which career she had studied. She made it clear that while many modelling opportunities had come her way, and which she took, she did not envisage using the Miss World title to propel her as an actress before movie cameras. I believed her.