Pakistan May Not Be Ready for Its Beauty Queen
If you live in the East Village, you may have seen the reigning Miss Pakistan coming out of her walk-up not far from St. Marks Place. You may have glimpsed her celebrating her victory with some friends at the Hudson Hotel, or entering one of the jazz clubs where she likes to hear live music.
Every once in a while, you can catch Miss Pakistan, Natasha Paracha, 24, hopping out of a cab in her rhinestone tiara, fresh from an appearance. “Give me that tiara!” a young man with his boyfriend called out to her on such an occasion a few weeks ago. “I want it!” She flashed them a megawatt smile but kept the tiara, which she normally stashes in a floral-patterned box in her closet.
On the one hand, it seems only natural that Miss Pakistan should live in downtown Manhattan, a place where celebrity seems to be its own form of local citizenry. On the other hand, it makes no sense at all. You could say a lot about the glamorous internationalism of, say, Shanghai, and yet there’s no chance that you’d catch the reigning Miss America taking up residence there, limiting herself to an audience of expatriates.
The Miss Pakistan pageant, now in its sixth year, is unique as these things go. None of this year’s 12 contestants, to start, reside in Pakistan, but hail instead from the United States, Canada and England. (The full title reflects that international flavor: Miss Pakistan World.) And the contestants do not compete for the crown in Lahore or Islamabad, but in Mississauga, Ontario. Pakistan, apparently, is not yet ready for a beauty pageant, although why that is depends on whom you ask.
“It’s still a new country, and pageantry is a new concept there,” said Ms. Paracha, chic in a Nanette Lepore dress, sipping an espresso at the Blue Water Grill. “The entertainment industry is just developing.”
Ms. Paracha, who works at the United Nations and has lived in the United States since age 2, allowed that there might be some backlash in Pakistan, a conservative Muslim state, if one of its representatives were to compete internationally in a bikini. Indeed, Amna Buttar, a founder of the Asian-American Network Against Abuse of Human Rights, who lives in Lahore, pointed out that there is currently a scandal brewing in Pakistan over a leak of photographs of the daughter of the governor of Punjab swimming in a bikini.
“In Pakistan, we are trying to get basic rights for women: right to marry, right to divorce, equal opportunity for job and education, and issues like Miss Pakistan create problems for this movement,” Ms. Buttar said in an e-mail message. “An average Pakistani young woman does not want to wear a bikini in public, and for her it is important to have equal opportunity and all focus should be on that, and not on a pageant where only the elite can participate.”
The founder of the pageant, a Toronto entrepreneur named Sonia Ahmed, said that she had been making plans to take the pageant to Pakistan as soon as next year until the fall of President Pervez Musharraf, whose government was considered relatively open to the advancement of women — which in Pakistan, at least, meant the conditions were relatively favorable for aspiring beauty queens. Now, she is keeping the pageant in Canada because she cannot guarantee the security of contestants.
“It may only be like 1 percent of the total population, but the fundamentalist problem is still present in Pakistan,” Ms. Ahmed said.
Since she was crowned in May, Ms. Paracha, a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, has limited her appearances to the United States, speaking at a gathering of nonresident Pakistanis in New York, showing up at a Pakistan Day celebration in Washington, raising money for Vision of Development, a nonprofit agency that she started in high school to support rural Pakistani women, and making the occasional media appearance.
This month, she went on CNN to urge her country to stand up and condemn the terrorist attacks on Mumbai, except that she accidentally used the word condone. Fortunately, it was clear from the context what she meant, and no international incidents ensued. (Slip of the tongue or not, her comments were an improvement on those of a previous Miss Pakistan: calling President Musharraf a “hunk” she’d like to date.)
So Ms. Paracha is a beauty queen, unlike most others in some important regards, and a lot like them in others: a comely ambassador for her country who’s eager to avoid controversy, promote her country and be a good role model for young women (she’s also an accomplished flamenco dancer). She told CNN she’d like “to show that Pakistani women are strong and we can definitely do a lot to represent the nation on a global sphere.”
It may sound like yet another blandishment, but given what Ms. Ahmed had to say, Ms. Paracha, who is traveling to Islamabad on Saturday to see her family and, she hopes, make press appearances, may be making more of a political statement than she would care to admit in taking on that particular crown.
In future global competitions, Ms. Paracha, an observant Muslim, says yes, she’d be willing to wear a bikini (there was no bathing suit event in this year’s Miss Pakistan competition, though there has been twice since 2002). “It’s just one small aspect of the pageant,” she said. Because both Miss World and Miss Universe require that their competitors be crowned in the country they represent, Ms. Paracha is ineligible for those competitions. But Miss Tourism Queen International — watch out!
E-mail: susan.dominus@nytimes.com
