On one of my morning drive to work, I bumped into the “Dark is beautiful” campaign of Nandita Das. The FM radio presenter started with the phrase “agar rang nahin hain, roop nahin hain…” and went on a sympathetic tone. I felt offensive.
Well, well! I am dark and I don’t belong to the category of crowd-pullers. But does that mean that every person who has dark skin colour is ugly? In other words, if you are dark are you ugly? I know few people who are dark complexioned but extremely beautiful. They are successful and do manage to get admiring glances from people around. And mind you, I am not talking about celebrities. I wonder how they will react to this perception and media-popular image of beauty.
As a kid, I too had an obsession towards fair skinned. I knew I was dark and did many things (under elderly guidance offcourse as they were more worried than me) to lighten my colour. Nothing worked though and with age I began to accept myself. Especially with a sibling who is much fairer and beautiful, I managed to get quite unhealthy comments on my looks. To be honest, it was painful but I learnt to live with it. And now I am even celebrating my difference. But the question remains, why do anybody, for that case, have to go through this phase? Why can’t we keeping feeling good about the colour we are in? Why don’t we grow up to the idea that a beautiful face may not be a fair face? Why do the matrimonial sections in leading newspapers still scream for fair-skinned sometimes even “extremely” fair-skinned candidates?
Why does our society not live without the various fairness cream, in all fairness why do we even need a campaign like “Dark is beautiful” to tell the world, that I am dark, I feel beautiful irrespective of the fact whether the world acknowledges it or not…I do not need celebrities to speak up for me. And if you think I am not, so be it?
