Quantification

I really fial to understand this concept of ranking women by beauty. It just does not make sense to me. Beauty seems to be defined by skimpy clothes, struts and pouts. Beauty lies in the eye of the beholder. So how come we rank them. The oddest thing is, it is those women who have become celebrities who are being ranked as the most beautiful women in the world! These women form just a fraction of the whole world population of women. There are so many pretty women out there who do not have to wear make-up or undergo surgery to look beautiful. I have met stunningly beautiful women in metros and buses who can easily outshine these celebrities. I realize that it is very difficult to rank everyone and so the celebrities are chosen, but then why this craze to rank women. It is also true for men, who are being ranked according to Most Handsome, Most Desirable, etc.. This is just a personification of the society’s urge to comodify everything around them so that they can talk in numbers. We seem to have lost the ability to analyse anything that is qualitative, and thus this urge to quantify everything. I was reading about some sociological and psychological experiments that are being carried out and I have come to know that psychologists have a table to rate social events that may affect a person in a negative way, for example, divorce carries say 4 points while the death of your father carries say 6 points. It is a scale of 10 with increasing emotional trauma. This just does not make sense at all. I know people who have been more emotionally affected by the death of their dog than the death of their father.

I see around me a massive effort to quantify everything – starting from business to emotion. Scholars are devoting their entire lives to bring out a formula to calculate how much I am happy when I see the colour blue. The space for emotions is slowly being eroded as it is far simpler to believe in numbers than in the abstract. Where is the difference between us humans and a robot? Their actions and emotions can be quantified and we are trying our level best to achieve that. I think it is just a big waste of humanity.