Few Queen Contestants
By Pulkit Sharma

Established in 1888, Malayala Manorama has grown to become a dominant media house in Kerala. The Malayala Manorama is the largest circulated daily newspaper in Kerala.  According to its website, it is also the first Indian language newspaper to achieve the circulation of more than one million. It gamut of operations include matrimonial sites to TV Stations. It has offices in major cities like Delhi, Mumbai and Bangalore.

Their website manoramaonline had launched a ‘Techno Queen Contest’ aimed at the booming IT-ITES Sector in Kerala. It is a simple no frills beauty contest.  You logon to their site and enter your name, age, educational qualifications, company name, height, weight and hobbies and upload a photo sized less than 200 KB.

Even though Malayala Manorama is a respected media group and this contest has been running for 2 weeks, only 4 girls have been game to participate.

One had thought that in these days of hugely popular reality TV shows people, more youngsters would be willing to publicly compete for fame and prizes. And not worry about embarrassing themselves.  After all, if the winner gets 5000 votes and you only get 50, who really care these days?  In this age of internet overload, everything is forgotten the next day.

Perhaps, there are only 4 contestants because Kerala, like most of India, is basically conservative.  Perhaps, techie women see themselves as a combination of brains and beauty and want to avoid stereotypical profiling.  Perhaps, they just don’t want to put their photos on the website for the whole world to see and judge. Perhaps, because the rules and regulations are in the local language and so not easily understood by techies hailing from other states.

What do you think are the reasons for so few contestants?