Wanna be another you?

<div class="section1"><div class="Normal">MUMBAI: Liberalisation kick-started the makeover trend, says ad man and self-described civic activist Alyque Padamsee. <br /><br />"There''s a sense of renewal in the air," he says, adding that the role model is Amitabh Bachchan who "rose like a phoenix out of his own ashes", and transformed himself from "<span style="" font-style:="" italic="">dishum dishum </span>star to the ad icon of India" with <span style="" font-style:="" italic="">Kaun Banega Crorepati</span>.<br /><br />"People are beginning to think, ''Why should I be one person all my life?'' Whether it is shoes or clothes or wives, it''s all about change." <br /><br />Of course, the determined promotion of aspirational consumerism has plenty to do with it. <br /><br />"When you wear the clothes of an emperor, you can feel like one," says Padamsee. <br /><br />Whatever happened to the belief that your inside matters more than your outside? <br /><br />Claims Queenie Dhody, the woman behind many of TV star makeovers, "It''s been a revelation for me to see how women are more confident, happier when they look better." <br /><br />Dhody says no one has ever asked to be made to look like someone else. <br /><br />But women who come to cosmetic surgeon Dr Narendra Pandya seeking nose jobs most often bring along a film star''s photo – Madhuri Dixit is the most popular – and some say they want "Aishwarya''s lips, Madhuri''s nose and Kareena''s cheek bones". <br /><br />"I have to tell them that the combination would be horrible," chuckles Dr Pandya. <br /><br />Changing your hair and clothes is a superficial way of refashioning your identity, notes Sandeep Desai, head of McCann and Erickson, India. <br /><br /></div> </div><div class="section2"><div class="Normal">"The makeover mania denotes a general impatience for transformation—to be different, to be ''world-class''," he says. <br /><br />The problem is that instead of expressing a personal vision, people settle for an imagined ideal, whether it is Madhuri Dixit or Shanghai. <br /><br />"The makeover is not an assertion of individuality but a stereotyped glamourisation," he says, adding, "It''s an illusion." <br /><br />This is where Jassi and Mumbai come in. The Shrek of TV soaps, in which the girl should succeed through talent and character not looks, has inevitably sold out (there was feminist outrage in beauty-contest-obsessed Columbia when the original Betty La Fea series madeover the main character). <br /><br />But what''s worse is that Jassi now looks like an insipid assembly-line pretty woman. "She''s lost her charm," moan many of her fans. <br /><br />The skin-deep nature of makeovers assumes greater significance when it comes to cities. <br /><br />What happens to the Plain Janes who don''t fit in with the new look? <br /><br />Reinvention, say some civic activists, comes with a price tag – a loss of self, slum demolitions. <br /><br />But Desai suggests that if Mumbai''s makeover is about beautification through flyovers and facials rather than transformation from within, it will eventually magnify the social divide. <br /><br />"A city is not just an advertisement to the outside world," he says, referring to the oft-heard complaint that slums near the airport put tourists off. <br /><br />"The problem is not solved just because it is concealed by make up." </div> </div>