Source:NY daily news

Susan Boyle is, to make a mammoth understatement, Reality TV’s new sensation. The “Daily Mail” even carried a story that Catherine Zeta-Jones, the glamorous star of films like “The mask of Zorro” was going to play the “Britain’s Got Talent” star in an upcoming move (!) on her life. Boyle is much like Paul Potts, a salesman who made Simon Cowell’s jaw drop back when Britain’s Got Talent used to be British Idol, but there’s somehow a bigger hullaballoo over Susan Boyle, more flash bulbs going off, more blog-tongues wagging. I mean no one ever started the rumour that Brad Pitt was going to play Potts, did they?

The reason for this is probably that Boyle is, to several people around the world,  a phenomenon simply because she seems a real-life Chic Lit character – Bridget Jones’ every dream come true. She is everything we are told we shouldn’t be at her age (47) – far from whippet-thin, grey haired, ageing, plump, wrinkled. Ponds Age Miracle, every L’Oreal product that Aishwarya Rai bats her eyelashes for, your next-door neighbour and her mother all think Catherine Zeta Jones (what irony), or even Michelle Obama is what mid-forties should look like – certainly not Susan Boyle.

And yet, she won over the hypercritical judges of Britain’s Got Talent with her remarkable singing and has taken a world of Reality TV lovers by storm – she is suddenly glamorous by virtue of the fact that the “image” the whole world is trying to keep suddenly didn’t matter when this woman opened her mouth to sing. It’s what we all dream would happen in our lives as we spend thousands getting dressed for interviews and meetings – that people would listen, not look – not care if your hair looked boring to them, or if your suit was a little tired, or if you had several chins and a belly that preceded you into every room – so long as what you said and what you did made perfect sense to them.

Boyle’s story reminded me of an interesting episode from my life as an undergraduate student. In my last days at College, we were all asked to attend a “beauty and grooming” workshop. I was appalled. We had never had any organized career counselling and I was sorely disappointed to learn we would be taught how to put on make-up and drape a Sari right the next day. So, I decided to participate as an observer the next day rather than refuse to be there, or actually do any of the stuff. As the workshop began, the organizers told us that beauty and grooming were the most important things in an interview – you always had to look glowing and immaculate. Half an hour into “Cleanse, Tone, Moisturize” and “brush upward in soft gentle strokes”, the cosmetician who was conducting this workshop said something that troubled me, and I seem to have found vindication in Susan Boyle. She said, “It doesn’t matter how intelligent you are or what amazing things you have to say. Unless you have the right face for it, no one cares.”

That pretty much describes urban culture today. Lawyers wear black and look immaculately dressed and scary, writers wear Pashmina, deep dark colours and stare soulfully into the camera, their eyes brimming with eyeliner, feminists hate pink, to be on TV you have to be Size 4 or less, and look like you grew up reading “Vogue”. Susan Boyle is suddenly so popular because British women (and women around the world) are suddenly telling themselves it’s okay. It’s okay to eat the extra chip, to decide to skip a facial, waxing or other painful beauty procedure and it’s okay to look just how one wants. Because maybe people actually listen to you.

Susan Boyle is a fairy-tale come true – but even better, because she’s cool for what she is and didn’t have to turn into a skinny, blonde princess to prove it. 

The Author
 Sneha Krishnan is an economics-obsessed, pasta-loving history student bound for Oxford this fall. She is usually found curled up in sofas with her ever-present macbook perched on some surface in the vicinity. Sneha first started thinking about doing Sa when she and Shweta realized that they were ranting about the day's news/ happenings practically everyday and everything they said had something to do with their feminist convictions. So they wondered how it would be to write about these things and more... and KaBoom... seven months and laborious code-learning (trial and error, the only method for us) sessions later, Sa came to be. Sneha’s favourite pastimes, besides feminism and Sa, are reading the New York Times, playing Scrabble and watching every movie that looks remotely interesting.

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