Zeenat Aman: I never found myself to be beautiful

MUMBAI — Veteran Bollywood actress Zeenat Aman, who redefined the image of women in Hindi cinema with her glamour and westernized fashion during the 1970s and 1980s, said that she never found herself to be beautiful.

Zeenat, who was tagged as a sex symbol, took to Instagram and shared a picture from her younger days.

For the caption, she wrote: “Sometimes I see an old picture of myself and think “you weren’t a bad looking girl, Ms. Aman!”. Now if I happen to say these words out loud, I am usually met with an annoyed groan and a dramatic roll of the eyes from whichever of the three millennials whose company I keep happen to be around.”

Even though she never found herself as beautiful, she accepted that other people did.

“It’s true though, I never found myself to be beautiful, but I did learn to accept that other people did. I recently heard the term ‘pretty privilege’, and goodness did I make use of mine! The world can be a cold place, and I learnt early in life to leverage every advantage I have to survive it.”

She agrees that “it reads hideously self-indulgent to state such a thing.”

“Afterall, I won a beauty pageant, was cast as a leading lady by the country’s most venerated directors, and was widely hailed as a “sex symbol”. So I can’t quite say why I was unable to fully embrace my physicality.”

“Perhaps one got more wrapped up in the performance of beauty than the feeling of beauty. Or perhaps such public emphasis on one’s looks depleted one’s emotional self worth. Or maybe I feared becoming arrogant, and felt it far too vain and indulgent to consider myself beautiful. Most likely it’s a combination of all these things and then some.”

She says “It’s really not that I have some exacting and impossible beauty standard.”

Zeenat sees beautiful people around her all the time.

“Yet sure enough, these people don’t think they’re beautiful either. Every compliment is met with a redirection to some perceived physical flaw. I’m quite sure you do it too! Which brings me back to the thought that physical beauty, no matter how widely acknowledged, is meaningless without self-validation.”