The unfairness ads

Indians have always been obsessed about getting into the fairer skin bracket. Matrimonial columns provide enough of a comment on this fixati...

Indians have always been obsessed about getting into the fairer skin bracket. Matrimonial columns provide enough of a comment on this fixation. Our ads are not far behind. Everything 8212; cars, perfumes, household gadgets 8212;are all brought by tall, brown-eyed, Anglo-Saxon lookalikes.

No dark-complexioned people figure in them, apart from the occasional lift man or a tapori having a haircut. The message? Brown Indians form the category that does the menial jobs.

On a visit to India from the US, my seven-year-old nephew turned on Cartoon Network and asked with the instant perception of children,8216;Mom, how come all the people in the ads out here are white?8217; Yet, in reality, you can hardly count the number of 8216;fair8217; people in a sea of brown faces. From doctors to engineers, to TV news anchors in India, you find successful, smart professionals who are all brown-complexioned.

With a slew of Miss Universe titles under their belts, Indian women are as beautiful as any other, the media shrilly proclaims. But there is a rider 8212;only 8216;fair8217; women generally qualify. What about the majority who are brown? Censored out by the events media, will they cease to exist? The intense discussions in girls8217; schools on the merits of being fair-skinned are the direct consequence of beauty pageants and fairness cream ads.

The pageants are proliferating and children under 15 are beginning to become unhealthily preoccupied with being fair and acquiring the Kate Moss look. That this could impair the development of healthy bodies and lead to complications like arthritis in early middle age is known.

There is a strong case, therefore, to ban such pageants, at least at the school level.

When will we learn to identify with being brown-skinned? When will the media celebrate our 8216;brownness8217;? Some in the ad world confuse being proud of our national heritage, with the observance of regressive rituals like karva chauth, and so on.

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Hence the complete man who wears the perfect suit, is only someone who can pass for white, right down to the pink baby he picks up from the cradle, but the brown-skinned loser who makes good after the lottery win inevitably wears an ill-fitting suit. Every fairness cream has its women looking devastated at the 8216;catastrophe8217; of being born dark-skinned and appearing ecstatic after being 8216;rescued8217; by the cream in question.

In order to retrieve our 8216;lost national pride8217;, we have serials that border on burlesque, with bare-chested men in tinsel crowns, fighting with wooden swords and who address each other as 8216;Arya putra8217;, quite forgetting that a good percentage of us are 8216;Dravida putras8217;. I prefer the savvy African rendering of the Biblical story of creation. In it, the good angles are all Black. It is Lucifer who is White. Touche!

The writer is member-secretary, Maharashtra State Commission for Women