Her skills in occasionally getting well-known sponsors made her rivals green with envy but the snide bitching barely fazed her. Says a former rival acidly, “Sunanda would claw her way to a sponsor and have him eating out of her hands, she was not a girl’s girl.”
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Sunanda-watchers in Dubai say it was around this time she adopted her new style statement—Dubai flash trash of peroxide hair streaks, heavy make-up, razzle-dazzle, seductive couture, false eyelashes, chrome nail paint, and Louis Vuitton victimhood. It was a sign of her arrival in the league of the neo-rich tycoons.
Some of the facts in the article are possibly true. But most of the writing seems to be speculative; plain bitching, in my view.
- On the other hand, Shoma Chaudhury has tried to present Sunanda's side in this interview in Tehelka (April 30). Chaudhury also takes the media and the rest of us to task. Here's an excerpt from the introduction:
A deep and unthinking misogyny has underscored all the reporting on her. Her real crime is that she is an attractive 46-year-old widow, who is bright, vivacious and hot — in the way only those women can be who have a comfortable relationship with themselves; who understand that beauty does not preclude one from being kind; or protect one from sorrow. If the media had wanted to try the two [Sunanda and Shashi Tharoor] for financial impropriety, it should have stuck to doing that. Instead, all of it has become an ugly spectacle about a society trying to decide what women are allowed and not allowed to be. Ambition, sass, and self-assured sexiness are clearly high on the list of India’s penal code for women.
Read the full interview here.
- Thanks to Nilofer D'Souza for the tip-off.
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