Not Just Skin Deep!

One thing pretty consistent of we Indians is the White skin fetish. Fair girls are often called pretty, where as the darker ones are often ignored, to an extent that they find it difficult to get a match for wedding, many of my friends don't want a dark girl as a girlfriend, the blight doesn't end there. It's appalling to note that we need to import models for our advertisements and worse yet movies. While we in India have blends of every possible shade. What we ignore is the fact that it is not just an ad film it is we the people who are wrong and it's our perception which is prejudiced. Here in India fair means beautiful, when elderly ladies comment ladki doodh si gori hai ,that means that she's beautiful according to them. To them it hardly matters if another darker complexioned girl looks prettier than her doodh si gori.Even the matrimonial ads hunt for tall, ’fair’ and slim girl of blah-blah caste, Doesn’t matter even if the prospective groom is dark, stout and balding.

While world over tanned skin is considered aesthetic, here in India everyone from your mother to relatives to friends to even neighbors would be at your back and ready to comment on your skin and would be ready as ever to offer their two cents on how to get fair. The 'remedial' measures include home treatments and exotic creams and everything that had ever brought a fair patch on the skin of some lone inhabitant of a distant planet in some galaxy no one had yet ever heard of.

What is it with fairness that makes it a national obsession(read aspiration)?It is more of a neurosis now with color. The total size of the grooming products market in India was estimated to be worth Rs. 8.0 billion in 2007 and the total fairness cream market alone is worth around Rs 820Cr. Another interesting stat that I stumbled upon was that when Kolkata-based Emami Limited, had launched India’s first-ever fairness cream for men it had launched that exclusively in Andhra Pradesh and according to a report the male users account for 26 per cent of the state’s total fairness cream market worth Rs 80Cr. What's the truth? Can fairness creams, soaps and talc turn Black Beauties into Snowhites? Expert verdict is a clear no. The reality is not so cut and dry. Even though there is no scientific backing of the claims made by manufacturers, sales of fairness products continue to gallop.

Irony is that we Indians complain that others are racist while we are hardcore racists at heart and this segregation based on complexion is nothing but profiling.The ‘fairnesss’ products are doing no good to the cause either, no wonder India is one of the largest markets for these ‘fairness’ products that claim to make you upto a couple of tones fairer. Films demand a foreign looking Indian actress or an Indian looking foreign actress as one lady head of a top media group sighed on the award winning episode of We the People on NDTV. Some even suggested that the word ‘fairness’ be banned. But if we look at things we would understand that the folklore is deeper than the ads. Even the gods supposedly lament their dark complexion - Krishna sings plaintively, "Radha kyoon gori, main kyoon kala? (Why is Radha so fair when I'm dark?)" . Sociologically we prefer fairer skin. Media is just a mirror of the society. No offence meant to anybody,but the first thing that most north Indians exclaim when then fly down south is the dark complexion,not that south Indians per se don’t look good or that the north Indians do, but it is the skin complexion that features top on the eye scan list. We only see what we want to see. We might never change, but we can atleast dream of a society which is less foolishly vain and targets to go up a couple of tones on things other than the fairness-scale.