Ultimately, watching The World Before Her was disheartening. For the women putting all of their hopes and aspirations into becoming Miss India, even before the winners were announced, I was sad. The only thing that kept playing in my mind was the statement “They can’t all win.” Yet they all believed they would win. I don’t want to say that they each had a false sense of reality, maybe that’s the only way to remain confident in a time like this. But the film made it clear how much winning this title meant to each of the women, and because the majority of them were going to lose, I couldn’t help but feel sad. Some of them did it to create an identity, a “personality” for themselves, but in the process lost their dignity. In the scene where they each had to use bags to cover their heads and bodies for the purpose of only seeing their legs, I expected at least one of them to give it up and say that she could no longer disrespect herself or her values, but clearly that was absurd. And for the Hindu Fundamentalists who receive their identity and their culture from their parents, they also pass over the chance to create their own identity. They spend their whole lives living for India and preparing to kill because of the threat of Westernization. I don’t recall the name of the woman who spoke to the idea of trading more than just products with different nations, but she had a good point. In a World that’s developing so rapidly, we’re also trading ways of living. “Just because an American takes up Yoga doesn’t mean that they’re becoming Indian, just as an Indian who wears jeans and a tank top isn’t becoming an American.”