With masks becoming the new normal, will we see the reinventing of the dynamics of human interaction, of the obliteration of class and looks divides, or will we simply find new ways of human segregation?
Commuters wear masks while waiting for a bus in Borivli. Pic/Satej Shinde
In Satyam Shivam Sundaram, a Raj Kapoor production of 1978, Rajesh (Shashi Kapoor) chances upon Roopa (Zeenat Aman), a village belle, whose dulcet singing and voluptuous body sparks in him an irrepressible urge for her. Rajesh is oblivious of the disfigured side of her face, always concealed from him by her pallu. The truth about Roopa's face is revealed to Rajesh on their nuptial night – he is repulsed.
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In the end, though, Rajesh grasps that the true meaning of a person's beauty is in the magnificence of his or her spirit, which should be admired over what is skin-deep, the film suggests. Lavishly mounted and erotic, the film flopped. Perhaps the audience could not accept that Roopa's disfigurement remained invisible to Rajesh through their dalliance.
Imagine a Satyam Shivam Sundaram remake, frame by frame, in 2020. Its makers will not have to resort to the dubious artifice of using Roopa's pallu or the darkness of the night to conceal her scarred face. They would get her to don the mask we see people wear today, in the hope of keeping at bay the novel Coronavirus, which preys upon the beautiful and the ordinary alike.
The mask is now the face, which hints at who we are. It is the face we meet first. That is why all of us tend to "prepare a face to meet the faces" that we meet. Our initial impression of a person is through his or her face, and then slowly his or her subordinate identities of class, caste, religion, etc are revealed to us. So also is disclosed to us, with time, the person's inner being, which can become an enchanting saga of discovery.
The face is now masked, depriving us of clues to who people are. The mask will efface to a great degree the significance of looks. It will compel us to search in people, in the manner of Satyam Shivam Sundaram's Rajesh, the beauty in them beyond their body. Physical beauty will be camouflaged. Our facial uniqueness will be concealed under the sameness of masks.
This sameness will threaten to undermine the $500-billion cosmetics industry, as beauty cannot preen and the ordinary will find little need for a facial boost. Challenged will be the "Lipstick Effect", which says people shift their expenditure from luxury goods to lipsticks during a crisis. No point applying lipstick behind the mask. No one will see your lips, and even you will discover, once you take off the mask, that the lipstick has been smudged.
The mask will deny to beauty the premium it is supposed to command at workplace, and insulate plain looks from the penalty these supposedly incur. Attractive people are said to produce better business outcomes, suggested Daniel S Hamermesh and Jeff E Biddle, who studied the labour market in 1993. They famously concluded, "The penalty for plainness [at workplace] is 5 to 10 per cent, slightly larger than the premium for beauty. The effects are slightly larger for men than women."
Beauty accounted for differential payments even in 2016. In that year, Jaclyn S Wong and Andrew M Penner claimed that attractive individuals earn "roughly 20 percent more than people of average attractiveness, but this gap is reduced when controlling for grooming [dressing up, for instance], suggesting that the beauty premium can be actively cultivated."
A more recent finding is that attractive women run the risk of suffering penalties at workplace. Stefanie K Johnson, of the London School of Economics, pointed out in a blog, based on a research study she and three others undertook, that attractive women may not be assigned jobs deemed masculine, or could get perceived as femmes fatales and, therefore, considered untrustworthy, or face retaliation on the presumption that their careers have flourished because they are show-stoppers.
For employees, attractive or otherwise, the mask could reduce the incidence of discrimination at workplace. Might we then celebrate the mask? Some Muslims are tickled by the thought that the novel Coronavirus has compelled critics of the burqa to wear the mask. They, obviously, gloss over the fact that even though the Islamic injunction on purdah applies only to women, even Muslim men have had to don the mask, which is undoubtedly discomfiting because the wearer has to continuously breathe in the exhaled air. Their experience will hopefully have them liberate women from the burqa.
In Pandemic! Covid-19 shakes the world, Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek writes: "If in the Cold War the rule of survival was MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction), now it is another MAD – mutually assured distance." The mask may merge the attractive and unattractive in the staid sameness of fabric, but it also ensures that an accidental proximity between two people would not lead to them falling ill. The individual has been subordinated to the collective fear, to its universality, of which the most eloquent symbol is the mask, which has already started to sell under prestigious brands, establishing the faceless wearer's exclusivity. The novel Coronavirus, clearly, has failed to smother class vanity.
The writer is a senior journalist
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The views expressed in this column are the individual's and don't represent those of the paper
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