The way Shilpa Shetty’s nose is moving up in life leaves one dizzy. From being big, fat and gawky, it is slimming down and shooting up. So much so that some feel it’s totally over-the-top and want Shilpa to go back to her original nose, fast. Same for model and actress Koena Mitra, whose nose seems to be dwindling rapidly.

Barbra Streisand:

The redoubtable singer and actress is an example of nose tolerance. She has kept on her big, spectacularly ugly nose just to “spite my face”, she has said. In return, she has been hailed as a “nose revolutionary, a nose nationalist and liberator, a preacher of proboscis pride, a nostro-terrorist, a prophet who saw the pert, snub, freckled, upturned, tidy, tiny, cute little all-American carport-perfection cheerleader popularity of the ideal nose personified by Doris Day back in the 1950s and … bloodied it.”

Cyrano de Bergerac:

A seventeenth-century French dramatist and duellist who is best remembered for his alleged long nose. It’s not known how many inches the original ran into — but in the films, in one of which the French hunk of hunks Gerard Depardieu plays Cyrano, the nose is huge and touched with tragedy. Cyrano is afraid that his beloved, his cousin, will reject him because he is bogged down by the weight of his nose.

Tenida:

One of Bengali literature’s most hilarious and best-loved characters, Tenida, created by Narayan Gangopadhyay, is a failure, a bully, and only good at inventing stories, but is a living illustration of the principle that whatever you do, you cannot keep a good man down. He has a large nose like a singara.

Surpanakha:

It’s just that she lost her nose, but she is a woman who is Cleopatra’s equivalent in India. What would happen to the country — its history, mythography and the Sangh Parivar — if Lakshman had not cut off her nose with his sword?

Michael Jackson: The man whose nose fell off.

Pinocchio:

The animated puppet whose nose is the most unfortunate lie-detector. He lies, it grows. He doesn’t lie, it doesn’t grow. What if it happened to Indian politicians?

Sherlock Holmes:

Are noses the seat of intelligence? It is good for sniffing out things, in any case. Sherlock Holmes had a prodigious nose. Arthur Conan Doyle, his creator, had said of the world’s greatest detective: “He had, as I imagined him, a thin, razorlike face, with a great hawk’s-bill of a nose, and two small eyes set close together on either side of it.”

Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer:

He is Santa Claus’s ninth and lead reindeer blessed with a red nose that gives off its own light. It illuminates the path of Santa and his team through bad weather. His song is synonymous with Christmas — so it is rather disappointing to learn that Rudolph did not come with Santa. He was created by Robert L. May in 1939 and is owned by the Rudolph Company, LP.

Cleopatra:

She started it all. It has been remarked that had it been shorter, the world would have been different. Some of the biggest Romans of the day — she ruled Egypt just before Christ was born — who saw it, loved it and stayed back, including Julius Caesar (who himself bore a celebrated long, Roman nose, some say hooked) and Mark Anthony. The nose itself, however, is questionable after all these years. The French word “retrousse” (tip-tilted, like those of Barbara Cartland heroines) seems to have been invented for it, but her currency-portraits suggest that it was a plainer, aquiline, slightly hooked nose rounded off by a prominent chin. Though it was to feature prominently in Asterix and Cleopatra almost 2,000 years later, where we also get to know how the Sphinx lost its nose (Obelix climbed on top of it).

 

 

Which famous nose do you like/dislike the most?
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