All's fair if everyone's fair

February 2002
American Idol- Season 9
Walking through the streets of Harajuku, from where the rest of Tokyo gets ideas on latest fashions and fads, I am face to face with an apparition of dyed blond hair, painted brown face and dark lipstick. The Yamambas of Japan take their time and carefully paint themselves at shades infinitely darker than their natural skin tones. So, dark is cool, eh? I wondered whether these ladies have any idea how the rest of the world, routinely fret and fume about what can be done so that they look fairer and supposedly, prettier.

Back home in India, perhaps thanks to nearly 200 years of colonial rule, good looks are defined almost always by a single attribute, fairness. Needless to say, there is a thriving fairness industry luring young women (and these days, men too) with promises of nirvana in just six weeks or may be even faster, provided they smear their face with the fairness cream, in the suggested liberal doses, day after month after year (Hey, did somebody say six weeks?). The hopes of fair skin comes packaged in tantalizing names like fair & lovely, fairever and fairlife (If life ain't fair, baby, get fairlife! how's that for an adline?).

If I thought this could be an India-specific craving, my doubts were dispelled during my year spent in Malaysia where I chanced upon Cerah & Ceria cream ('C' as in Ciao - translated as 'fair & happy). The implication of course, was that if you are dark, you stand no chance of being happy in your life and will have to spend your entire living moments a sad mental wreck. There was also the more spookily named Cerah Cinta (or 'fair love'). So much so for thinking that love is blind.

Couple the fairness angle with arranged marriages, you get a potentially lethal combination. Darker girls routinely get taunted and teased all through their lives with words or equivalents of blackie, black ghost, demoness and similar terms of endearment. Why is that we don't have any fair, tall, slim devils in our myths? How come they are always dark, bloody-eyed, frizzy haired things with fangs who gleefully laugh 'Buwahahahaha' after munching human beings like potato chips?

As for our hapless dark girls in question, apart from a shattered self-confidence, once the girls arrive the marriable age, they need to suffer all these complimentary descriptions from absolute strangers who come to check them out, in the garb of potential suitors. Suddenly, marriage brokers become apologetic, parents turn defensive, promises of dowry escalates and the groom (never mind the fact that he might be a squint-eyed, crooked-nosed, obese ogre) behaves as if he is doing a supreme sacrifice by marrying the girl.

Along with this, there would be a steady accumulation of wealth (or loot, for many government officials), all in anticipation of the day when the ugly potential groom comes and gives free and frank opinions on their daughter as if he's an adonis disdainfully judging a beauty pageant. After the opinion, the groom will walk away with the money, the girl and that smug feeling you get when you do profound things for the betterment of society, which is so great for untamed male egos.

All through their lives, the dark women move on with lesser friends, lower self-esteem and a damning acceptance of fate (or you can be a Michael Jackson, provided you have a few gadzillion dollars to spend on eager plastic surgeons). See where the problem lies? Unlike the Caucasians, Negroids or the pure Mongoloids, we guys in rest of Asia is a mixed race, with a blistering array of complexions.

The only solution to this is to ensure that all people, big and small (as Paul McCartney would put it, in one of his motivational numbers) will walk around with identical complexions, whether fair, brown or dark. Suddenly, a lot of interesting racist remarks on colors would go, a lot of people might become more confident.

I am generally scared of lowest common denominators and consequently scared of large occasions where only lowest common denominators (LCD, as per our maths teachers) prevail, like for instance, most class parties or parliament elections. You would have empathized with my tears if you had to listen to 'Hotel California' or 'I want to break free' 4 million times because these are amongst the popular choices. Or if you had to look at some of the politicians our LCD public elects, never mind the fact that their esteemed leader has the competency levels which would give your alley cat a definite superiority complex.

So, in a continent of amazing diversity in terms of religion, races, culture and color, fantasizing about everyone having nearly the same complexion is like asking everyone to take singing as their profession. The output I guess would be rap music, so you know the potential disasters. Given a choice between dark complexions and an hour of rap music everyday, I would happily opt for the former, even if it comes with pimples, scars and perpetual oily secretions. In any case, rap music has been certified as a guaranteed killer of brain cells, having the power to reduce the IQ levels of whole communities and their pets by half.

In conclusion, much as this would reduce the general corruption levels in government servants accumulating wealth for their daughters' dowries, I would still advocate diverse complexions. But ladies, do tone down that flab in your bodies please. I prefer you to be slim and trim. Now, was that my imagination or was that you making a snide one on my podginess?