LOOKS COULD KILL: Brinda Karat (top) and Mandira Bedi

Beautiful women always have it easy, right? You think they lead a blessed life, attracting admirers by the dozen and shimmying up the professional ladder with nary a hiccup on the way. Competition withers before lovely women, doesn’t it, and doors swing open wherever they go?

Well, maybe they do at times. But, hey, a beautiful woman may also find those doors firmly and resolutely shut. For truth be told, beauty isn’t always the kind of password to success that it’s cracked up to be. And a woman with drop dead gorgeous looks — unless she is in showbiz — may actually find the going tough because of the tide of envy and hostility she provokes. Votaries of political correctness may shake their heads in bemusement, but fact is, beauty can be a beast. What’s more, it’s almost the perfect excuse to undercut a woman’s competence and intelligence.

Writer and columnist Shobhaa Dé, who knows all about the realpolitik of social sniping, agrees: “A beautiful woman has to fight prejudice and envy most of her life.”

Not convinced? Think Brinda Karat, the beauteous CPI(M) politburo member. It has taken her long years to ascend to her party’s highest body. But even now the elegant and urbane Mrs Karat is a relative political welterweight amidst such heavyweight women pols as the shrill and shabby Mamata Banerjee, the shriller and hell-raising Mayawati, or the quintessential behenji Sushma Swaraj who packs a punch with her inch-long sindoor and po-faced platitudes.

In the hurly burly of Indian politics, nothing succeeds like excess, and these women make it a point to be as dramatic and strident as possible. Karat too has been trying hard to get ahead in the stridency stakes — during the Nandigram imbroglio she advocated a dose of Dum Dum dawai (mob lynching) to those opposing the CPI(M) there. But despite these rabble-rousing tactics, maybe her sophisticated looks continue to be a sticking point. Though her friends and associates deny this strenuously, maybe the glamorous 60-year-old former Miss Miranda (she won the Miranda House beauty contest in 1963) simply cannot command the political heft that — and let’s be polite here — the ornery Mamatas and Mayawatis do.

Interestingly, Hillary Clinton recently refused to appear on the cover of Vogue for fear that she would look too “feminine”. Her decision led Vogue editor Anna Wintour to write frostily, “The notion that a contemporary woman must look mannish in order to be taken seriously as a seeker of power is frankly dismaying.”

But Clinton, whose appearance has been feverishly and pitilessly dissected by the media, and whose choice of attire is an androgynous pantsuit, knows that she must pull off a complicated high wire act. While as a woman, she can’t afford to appear too masculine (read, domineering), looking “too feminine” could also scupper her chances when she is trying to blast into the biggest male bastion of ’em all — the US presidency. Clearly, Clinton knows that in the high power world of politics, a Maggie Thatcher or an Angela Merkel scores much more than someone who looks too good for comfort.

Nor is politics the only arena where beauty or femininity can prove to be a hindrance rather than a help. Take tennis star Sania Mirza, for instance. Had her face not been as fetching as her forehand, it’s unlikely that she would have been targeted quite so viciously for this or that religious or moral “infringement”. Had she hidden her sexiness behind loose shirts and longer skirts, and played down her oomph, chances are that people would have concentrated more on her game and less on showing her up as a controversy-prone, irreverent hellcat.

Hostility apart — men too may turn against a beautiful woman if she is an able competitor and is unlikely to grant sexual favours — an ugly prejudice that many good looking women have to contend with is that beauty doesn’t go with brains. Remember that old stereotype of the dumb blonde?

Mandira Bedi, she of the “noodle strap” cholis and mega watt smile, admits that she faces this prejudice daily. When she stepped out of the tinsel world of TV serials and appeared on a cricket show, which was hitherto a cosy men’s-only club, she was immediately dubbed a bimbo. “I don’t know if people thought I was beautiful, but they certainly thought I was dumb,” says Bedi. Even now, she says, when she does corporate events, people “explain things to me in tremendous detail as though I were a nitwit.”

Dé points out that even worse than not being taken seriously, a good looking woman will find her success being constantly questioned. “She will find herself an object of slander, with nasty implications that she has achieved whatever she has by trading on her good looks. Which is why, adds Dé, especially in corporate life, government and politics, beautiful women are often forced to play themselves down in order to be considered less threatening in the workplace.

Nayantara Palchoudhuri does just that. A typical Bengali beauty, with fine eyes and long, lustrous hair, Palchoudhury runs three tea estates and has served as the first lady president of the Bengal National Chamber of Commerce. “I mostly dress like a grand mom,” she says, laughing. “When you are out working, you have to underplay yourself a little.”

But why is the combination of beauty and brains such a lethal cocktail that the former needs to be toned down to make sure that the latter isn’t ignored? And why is a woman’s physical allure immediately taken to be proof of her mental deficiency? Indeed, studies too suggest that this is so. For instance, a 2005 study in the US by Lawrence University psychology professor Peter Glick found that attractive women managers who dressed sexy “evoked hostile emotions” and were “deemed less intelligent”.

It’s ironical that beauty should have the power to evoke such negative vibes when there’s a whole flourishing beauty industry out there feeding off women’s endless quest to achieve it. But perhaps beauty achieved — buffed, polished or liposculpted — is infinitely more tolerable than that infinitely rare thing, the true and natural beauty a woman is born with.

Of course, not everyone agrees that good looks can be a burden in the workplace. Ritu Beri, the fashion designer one always tended to confuse with a fashion model, has this to say: “Beauty is a gift of god. I have never felt it to be a disadvantage in any way.”

And there are those who diss the idea that beautiful women will never get any traction in Indian politics. Why, that most beautiful and elegant woman politician of them all, Indira Gandhi, ruled the country for decades, didn’t she? “But she was cold as an ice cap,” says Khushwant Singh, the venerable old writer and journalist. But Singh concedes that the late Mrs Gandhi, though she was quite elderly by then, was the target of many a malicious rumour perhaps because of her patrician good looks. “Dinesh Singh, who was her foreign minister, spread the gossip that on foreign trips she used to send messages to him, asking him to come over after dinner. Of course, when Mrs Gandhi found out, she promptly sacked him!”

So maybe there’s hope for someone like the luminous Priyanka Gandhi. She just needs to wait around in the wings, add the weight of years — and perhaps a few strategically placed grey hairs — to give herself the necessary gravitas. Right now she is too darned good looking to pass muster.