Exam time and I feel like the jallad again setting paper to ruin the happiness of lots of people but honestly it is one of the perks of teaching. At least it is to me!!! Today I finished setting the last paper and I really feel so relieved. I went to college to submit the paper and I met my kids. Honestly I don’t think I can ever forget them. It was so nice to see them again!!! I was all dewy eyed and emotional when I left from there!!! I think I truly love them!!!

I was totally confounded by the sudden outburst of comments today when I opened my mail. I received comments from dhir, sucharita and varunavi and it made my day. The fear of every writer is “not being read”…… believe me the feeling is suicidal. With my feeds all worked up I was feeling just that until I reminded myself that I am no writer!!! Thank god for small mercies of the lord!!! Else like hoards of others I would have to dwell on the opinion of other people!!! definitely not my cuppa!!!

OK first of all a thing that I have been wanting to write since day before yesterday but I just did not have the time for it. It was something I saw……. rather someone I saw!!! Koena Mitra in Jhalak dikhlaja. Man she looks like a martian from some other planet!!! She is definitely a science miracle but I must say not much art involved. She looks like a quilt!!! she has been stitched and restitched. The entire geography of her face has been changed. All because she wanted to become more beautiful than she was and according to me she WAS very beautiful. I loved her in saki saki!!! Now she looks like a thanksgiving turkey all stuffed up with gel and silicone. That brings us to the question…….. are looks important??? How much of importance do we give to appearance??? Is it so important that we undergo torture just to get into some kind of shoes or fit a role. We get stuffed up with god-knows-what and things are removed or put into our temple of a body. All of this to look good!!! Koena Mitra is just unlucky that her surgery went kaput else nobody would have realised that she had reconstruction work done on her face and she would be another bong beauty to look out for.

A friend of mine once told me it was only the packaging that people ever noticed. I never believed it simply because that wasn’t my funda for life. In fact the people I even had crushes on all my life were rather weird looking or normal looking. Nobody was drop dead gorgeous or even anywhere close to Hritik or Tom Cruise or George Clooney material…… Thank God for that!!! In the arranged marriage market too girls are treated like commodities up for sale and most often than not they are judged solely on looks and looks only.

Being fat is also part of it. People including me spend lots of time and money just to lose weight. But in most cases being fat causes a lot of health ailments and is not good. I never bothered about myself being fat until I started having serious problems with my health. When I was younger I was never obese (I wore a 26 jeans then) but family called me fat. Today I think that they should have had their heads examined and believe me I tell that to them. I gained weight because of some health problem and then the weight by itself started to cause health problems. I got into an infinite loop and the only way out was to lose weight. Once I lost weight the health factor was no longer a concern.

We always give a lot of importance to first impressions. What can we come to know about a person on first impressions apart from looks??? In my career as an HR person interviewing people, I can say one thing. First impressions are not always right. You make a set of ten questions on which you judge the candidate and believe me most of the times they aren’t really right. A person can use only one thing there….. intuition. The feel good ones are separated from the not so feel good ones and technically round pegs are matched with round holes…… that’s it. But would you give a guy who is dressed badly another chance. You might think that the person does not think that the job is important enough to dress properly and the people who dress up like a peacock for an interview are marked not very serious or professional.

My friend who heads a marketing division once told me that appearances in the professional front are very necessary. You have to dress up for the job-in-hand. Would you ever take a sales person who is dressed shabbily seriously??? Koena Mitra did the same. She was dressing for the job. You cant wear a lehenga to work or for that matter wearing cargoes to work are a catastrophe.

What is necessary is to understand how far you are ready to go for your job. Smita Patil and Deepti Naval and Vaijayantimala might not have done item numbers but they were good actresses and they looked beautiful. In the corporate work front you might not wear new clothes but you can dress neatly that is what actually counts……. I don’t think Armanis are necessary for that. Its all about how far you want to go!!!

All in all I think the most important thing is to be comfortable with your own looks and for people who have a problem with your looks……….. let them go to hell!!! They don’t deserve anything from you not even anger!!!