Pakistani beauty queen profiled by NYTimes
By Masood Haider
Saturday, 20 Dec, 2008 | 03:10 AM PST |
Miss Pakistan World Natasha Paracha.—misspakistanworld.com
NEW YORK: A Pakistani girl, crowned Miss Pakistan at a beauty contest in Mississauga, Canada, was profiled in the New York Times Friday.
Natasha Paracha, 24, a resident of East Village, New York, works at the United Nations and has lived in the United States since age 2.
The founder of the pageant, a Toronto entrepreneur named Sonia Ahmed, told the newspaper that she had been making plans to take the pageant to Pakistan as soon as next year. She changed her plans after the fall of President Pervez Musharraf, under whose governmemt she believed conditions in Pakistan were relatively favorable for aspiring beauty queens. Now, she is keeping the pageant in Canada because she cannot guarantee the security of contestants.
‘It may only be like 1 percent of the total population, but the fundamentalist problem is still present in Pakistan,’ Ahmed said.
Since she was crowned in May, Paracha, a graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, has limited her appearances to the United States, speaking at a gathering of nonresident Pakistanis in New York, showing up at a Pakistan Day celebration in Washington, raising money for Vision of Development, a nonprofit agency that she started in high school to support rural Pakistani women, and making the occasional media appearance.
This month, she went on CNN to urge her country to stand up and condemn the terrorist attacks on Mumbai. According to the Times, Paracha accidentally used the word ‘condone’ instead of ‘condemn.’
The Miss Pakistan pageant, now in its sixth year, is unique as these things go. None of this year's 12 contestants, to start, reside in Pakistan, but hail instead from the United States, Canada and England.
http://www.dawn.net/wps/wcm/connect...akistani-beauty-queen-profiled-by-nytimes-szh