A universal winner from Earth again!

The crowning of Harnaaz Sandhu as Miss Universe - the third Indian after Sushmita Sen in 1994 and Lara Dutta in 2000 - is delightful news. It celebrates the perfect mix of nature and nurture. But a niggling question remains. Miss India, yes. Miss World, yes. But how is a woman the finest specimen that the universe can offer year after year? The annual beauty pageant that has been launching a face since 1952 is inter-national, not inter-planetary, not even inter-galactic. Not to nitpick, but it would be a trifle presumptuous to suppose that Earth - and, that too, a particular species from this planet on the fringe of a galaxy in the constellation Sagittarius - has bagged each and every Miss Universe title since this big-bang event was first organised by a California clothing company (when Miss Finland had won).

Which, of course, does not diminish Sandhu's achievement. While beauty and brains have been known to come together famously in, say, dolphins, the problem in crowning a non-human is two-fold: (human) organisers of Miss Universe are unable to differentiate between species other than their own (some unable to do it even outside their own ethnicity), and non-humans are unlikely to say the winning line, 'Come out, speak for yourselves because you are the leader of your life, you are the voice of your own,' as Sandhu has.