The world of pageants has al­ways been a talk­ing point for de­bate. Whether beau­ty is ‘skin deep’ or ‘in the eyes of the be­hold­er,’ pageants have be­come a bone of con­tention as to whether their val­ues are kosher or even ben­e­fi­cial, in the long run.

My ex­pe­ri­ence with pageants has been ground­ed in em­pow­er­ing po­ten­tial, strate­gis­ing op­por­tu­ni­ty and net­work­ing con­nec­tion. Yes, in­deed, their orig­i­nal premise might have been skewed by the no­tions of ge­net­ic bless­ing, sole­ly, as a right to ac­cess, but that old premise has been changed dras­ti­cal­ly. Not on­ly have beau­ty de­f­i­n­i­tions al­tered dra­mat­i­cal­ly but the rai­son d’etre of pageants re­side in a trans­for­ma­tive jour­ney and a dy­nam­ic be­com­ing that yield well-round­ed in­di­vid­u­als ex­po­nen­tial­ly.

Grant­ed that some mis­giv­ings still do per­tain, how­ev­er, the no­tion of an en­hanced life chance af­ford­ed by the par­tic­i­pa­tion in an ac­tiv­i­ty with plat­forms for char­i­ty en­gage­ment cir­cum­stance, hu­man de­vel­op­ment con­cern and mean­ing­ful soror­i­ty con­nec­tion over­rides the my­opic de­trac­tions and serves to au­gur well for sus­tain­able po­si­tion­ing so as to make a dif­fer­ence with the life of the del­e­gate.

Enough al­ready, with the di­dac­tic posit­ing on be­half of the pageant pros. Sim­ply put, take every op­por­tu­ni­ty to make a dif­fer­ence in your life and the life of oth­ers. Make beau­ty have a pur­pose in­ter­nal­ly, through spir­it, and out­ward­ly, by demon­stra­ble ex­pres­sion. This is the style of the pageant process. The Miss World Trinidad and To­ba­go fran­chise hold­ers, Bri­an Gopaul and Reiaz Mo­hammed have cer­tain­ly en­dorsed this for­mu­la for al­low­ing young women to trans­form their lives and im­pact pos­i­tive­ly on so­ci­ety—pret­ty is as pret­ty does.

The un­der­ly­ing ethos is that one must un­apolo­get­i­cal­ly do every­thing to im­prove the lives of the dis­placed, dis­pos­sessed and the dis­abled. The “beau­ty with a pur­pose” mis­sion has en­thralled young ladies who be­lieve that the ex­pres­sion of beau­ty is in the do­ing of good. Miss World T&T fos­ters this mag­nan­i­mous agen­da, ral­ly­ing the na­tion­al com­mu­ni­ty to sup­port these young ladies who have tak­en up the man­tle to make a dif­fer­ence with their lives.