Fashionably yours!
A pearl necklace elegantly placed on the neck, with a black Hermes’ bag in hand, Jimmy Choo shoes stylishly complementing the blue attire and to add to that a pair of over sized Roberto Cavalli shades covering half the face of Pakistan’s youngest foreign minister, 34 year old - Hina Rabbani Khar.
As the lady in blue made her way out of the Indira Gandhi International airport in New Delhi, news about Pakistan’s new “it” girl (rather woman) were surfacing the newsrooms and eventually the newspapers and television channels. As the Indian media was going gaga over the lady minister’s sense of style; few wondered if the outer beauty would bring inner strength to the Indo-Pak relations or not.
The unimpressive oratory skills and content of the short India trip was given a miss as fashion took centre stage for the indian media. It seems a proper dressing sense can overtake articulate sense of expression when the Mumbai terror attack comes down to being a“Mumbai incident”. Her calibre and grit for her profession is masked by the Birkin’s that she “apparantly” loves to carry.
However, the Indian media’s obbsession with fashion trends of female politicians is not new; be it Michelle Obama’s trip to India or prediction of the contents of Hillary Clinton’s vanity bag way before she touched the indian shores. Is it because our very own desi girls are at ease with a cotton sari and a saffron dupatta rather than sporting the likes of Gucci and Prada?
Imagine the front page of a national daily describing in detail Gilani’s and Musharraf’s Tag Huer or Armani. The media sheds its role as a fashion police and takes up the job of a head khansama, discussing dinner and lunch menus at length when it comes to the male politicians. The media trivializes important meetings such as these by creating a whirlpool of inane issues thereby concealing the real cause.
Following closely the route taken by Indian media has Pakistan now like many other things taken the aid of “foreign” brands to bring about a make over in the Indo-Pak relations in the eyes of the world? Has Pakistan finally understood that fashion always takes precedence over the most pertinent and important issues?
Is pakistan going through an over hauling process by throwing in a young pretty face to beautify its most important portfolio, i.e. foreign relations at a time where its international image has taken an ugly turn. They say a picture is worth a thousand words, we think Pakistan has taken this saying quite literally!