| | Nothing in the article implies that Singh needed a beauty contest to tell her that she is beautiful. Why infer it?
There are many conceivable good and even admirable reasons for entering a beauty contest, especially one not limited to physical beauty, and of these many in which being declared most beautiful would be a means rather than a final end. Beauty contests, even with a second-place finish, don't seem to have harmed Aishwarya Rai's career. And would The Fountainhead, or beauty via health, have received such notice without Singh's win?
But let us suppose that a contest's pronouncements were also, for someone, ends in themselves. Would having such an end necessarily be base? Compliments are part of courtship ritual; need they lack primal importance? And what of the metaphysics-reinforcing implications; ought life be without them?
The article says too little about Singh's contest to be certain of any of the conventional shallowness parodied in movies. It ought to be possible, with the Web, to conduct contests in significant depth without great expense or distraction.
Nothing about beauty contests per se makes them pointless.
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