Dark and Lovely....

If you play the word association game with the words "dark and lovely", specifically amongst folks from India (possibly my age, though I am unsure about the newer IT generation), I am willing to wager anything, that nine out of ten folks will quote the poem by Robert Frost, that every Indian knows was the late PM Jawaharlal Nehru's favourite :

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
and miles to go before I sleep,
and miles to go before I sleep.

If the game participants were to be international, the associations would be drastically different. Besides the woods, there are lots of other things that are dark and lovely. People. Women. Etc.

But for some companies , the phrase is almost persona non grata.

"Fair and lovely" is a complexion cream marketed by Unilever in the Indian market. The ads show various girls turning lighter, around several shades in , say 7 days, and going on to become air hostesses, actresses and so on, teaching a lesson to folks who initially rejected them.

Another facial bleach cream shows a darkish lady sitting in economy class in a plane , whereupon, the oxygen mask falls only in front of her. (her face is dark, the bleach has oxygen and she turns fair on applying the bleach. Voila ! No oxygen mask, and her neighbor smiles at her........)

Notwithstanding the crass stupidity in these ads, it is very clear, that the majority of the Indians have an obsession with fairness. As in complexion. (And we wont say anything about matrimonial ads. Everyone looks for "fair and homely".... as if "dark and homely" are mutually exclusive)

This then, doesn't remain "fair" at all , to those, who are, are melanin empowered, so to speak.

And so we come to the story of a girl, who was destined to be part of a family, where her only sibling was very fair. (Actually, fair here is being used as an attitudinal description; it is beside the point that he was also very fair complexioned; that most of India would see it as a "white", is a given).

When she was little, she oozed confidence. Least bothered with eye-crossed visitors who tried to figure out the complexion difference in siblings, she simply thrived and enjoyed being at home, playing, school,friends, grandparents, eating, teasing, being teased, fighting..exploring.... everything.

School was a bit different. For one thing her brother went there. She was an adopted child, and some of the teachers, to the consternation of her folks, actually came up them, in a pssst kind of way, to complain about something , and ended up saying, "after all, her culture is different from her brother's....! Some worldly smart(!) types even asked her parents why they didnt "get" a fairer child !
In this narrow and unenlightened environment it wasn't long before nosey classmates and other girls queried her about her inborn inability to match her brother in complexion, no doubt after hearing some elders talk.

Her melanin empowered skin was building up resistance power in more ways than one. Tormentors were labelled yellow and green by a little girl who refused to give up. She swam a lot. And suffered the least trauma , amidst a bevy of girls, who went into a depression over a 10% change ,in their complexion,for the darker, over the summer in the pool.

Teenage happened. Days of doubts. Obsessions with various types of organic facials made from fruits and grains. Awareness of pseudo utopian images in leading Indian women's magazines , that existed only for advertisers. By and by , all that swimming, good diet and those homemade natural cleansing agents, started showing results.

She didn't become "fair" in the Indian sense, but her skin and hair had a great glow, and she became a confident young woman, comfortable in her own skin.

Such is the obsession with fairness in India, that her parents were cautioned, by highly educated (!) neighbors, about sending her for swimming "lest she turned "black""......and television now had a daily serial where a bunch of sisters, one very fair and one dark, went through life, the fair one sailing through everything and the dark one having to fight....

Family and well meaning folks had been telling her, since she was a child, that darkness was a state of mind, not a complexion. There were plenty of "fair" folks with very dark minds. And vice versa. And as she grew up, she started believing that.

And so she doesn't really worry about her color any more.

She has grown up, in more ways, besides calendar years....

She is learning graphic design and animation now as she completes her college graduation on the side. They are learning some Adobe Software and she often has assignments.

Yesterday I saw her fooling around with Photoshop, and I heard her chortling away.

I went to investigate.

"You know, you can change people's complexion in Photoshop".

"Watch."

And she did some choosing of tools from a menu, and swishing around of the mouse, as her own childhood photo got modified into a "fair version". Everytime she created, a still fairer version, she would crack up, into peals of laughter....

The whole thing was so entertaining to her. She changed complexions till she would have probably given a Punjabi Kudi or Marilyn Monroe a complex.

Then she changed things back.

Looked up at me. Wrinkled her nose.

Nodded approvingly, and said " I think I like it as is , the original is the best....... don't you think so ?"
That's what called, Being Digitally Dark and Lovely.

Being strong and mature enough, to keep yourself digitally unchanged.

I bet Adobe chaps never thought of this psychological use of Photoshop. Maturing by Photoshop.

And Dark and Lovely isn't about Robert Frost, and folks trudging through woods , counting their miles before they sleep.

Its about this Dark and Lovely girl, going from strength to strength....

This entry is a part of the contest at BlogAdda.com in association with imlee.com

'Fair' is just a four lettered word.....

They say , time is a dressmaker specializing in alterations.

And it has occurred to me after half a century of observing the alterations, that  we as insensitive, undisciplined people,  force these alterations, much against the  suggestions of the dressmaker. 

All people are different. In origin, language, physical, mental, and genetic traits. 

All people are curious , and question things.  But the answers differ.

There was something in life 40-50 years ago, when as a child, one understood why someone could have a dark complexion, but didn't have a public discourse on it.  There were things you paid great attention to at certain ages, and you didn't get obsessed with skin color as a child.  Of course as you grew up you noticed tendencies in society, but you were taught never to comment on physical characteristics of people.

Today, we are so blatant about this concept of "fairness" , that it gives "being fair" to someone a bad name, thanks to the unfortunate nomenclature.    

The concept of fairness.  Nothing to do with bending backwards to be fair to someone. But the  unending struggle to appear "fair" to the world. In complexion, and not in spirit.

-And so what do you say to a young girl, swimming her heart off, in a day long swimmathon, among the top so-many,  emerging to change clothes in the evening, and encountering mothers of other swimmers, who audibly and to-her-face remark on how "black" she has become, and hurry to rub their kids down with some expensive soap, destroying her joy at having done well....

-And what do you say about a huge group at a picnic, a couple has joined in with their newly adopted slightly wheatish complexioned daughter, and an acquaintance, boasting of amazing education levels in the family, looks at the child, then at the parents, smirks, and asks, "I didn't know you liked the color black !"  (The parent is known to have stared at he little girl, looked up, smiled , and said, "Black ? What black?"...)

-And what do you say of some "well meaning" neighbors, who advise someone NOT to send the daughter for water sports, because she will turn dark; this despite they having a non-sporting but  extremely intelligent , "fair"ly wheatish daughter....   

-and what do you say to prospective nosy ladies who blatantly discuss and describe a girl of marriageable age  'as  a wonderful person "except", that she is a bit on the wheatish side....'

Something has to change. It is time. 

For a start,  ban all fairness advertisements on television. For a television system that turns a blind eye to liquor ads  moonlighting as sodas, cds and casettes , and winking about it,  you need to be tough. 

Go to court against the multinationals .  Bring in scientists to define what decides a person's skin color, melanin levels , what is changeable , what is not , etc. 

 Despite having a ministry to deal with and control this, we do not seem to have a "truth in advertising" clause anywhere. 

And so  watch and learn, that you can get jobs after 7 days of slathering some cream, twice daily,   and forget all the examinations you slogged over and practicals you did in college, and placement interviews you did. 

And you also watch as someone endlessly dabs on some cream, and suddenly becomes a heroine instead of an "extra"....

And you watch in even more amazement , as a fellow  , earlier snubbed by the village belles,  polishes his face with some fairness cream, and gets mobbed on the stairs, exiting his house.   Whatever happened, to  slogging chaps working in fields, riding tractors, lifting loads and the like ?

Anybody can tell that resultant fair faces on TV are more a product of camera overexposure. This may actually be,  for want of a better word, another scam.

Ban these ads. Penalize them for misleading.   Investigate the ingredients, and confirm that banned items are not being used. 

Realize, that we as a people, were doing perfectly fine beauty wise, even before all the multinationals came in to the country , bringing in makeup items with atrocious costs, and ran ads to make you feel insecure about your looks, filling the coffers of women's magazines with their ads.

Realize , that  we as a people , didn't hanker after designer body parts earlier and didn't do too badly with what we had.   We were comfortable , more so in mind, and did not go through all the mental trauma, young folks obsessed with looks go through today. 

Teach your children, to enjoy a clean face and skin, whether dark or fair. Encourage the use of  authentically herbal age old  mixtures, that function as antiseptics as well as cleansing agents. 

Teach your child, never to make fun of some one's   physical characteristics, whether it is shape,size, or color.  

Teach your child, that there could be dark minds in fair faces, and fair minds in dark faces, and the latter was to be infinitely preferred.  We don't talk about the remaining two options, dark minds in dark faces and fair minds in fair faces, simply because this kind of thinking is the problem we face today. 

I've seen brilliant smiles on dark faces, heartfelt laughs on fair faces, and I have seen both intermingling happily.  Dark and Light are what we live with day in and day out. Each has its own equal beauty.

And so if you ask me, I think it is really time to change the meaning of "Fair"......  

Like I said earlier , time is a dressmaker specializing in alterations.

Maybe, we can , for once , ignore all those catalogues with folks in poses and clotheshorses in action, and listen to what the dressmaker, with its life long experience,  has to say......  

This goes as an entry to http://facebook.com/sftimetochange (time to change)....