After a long wait, the sun has popped out of the Big Blue Toaster. The sunny in sunny California is back. Catching up with a friend last week, I asked him what his plans for the weekend were, and he said getting a tan was on top of his agenda.
I looked visibly amused.
‘Ah well, you wouldn’t care, you are already tanned.’
Well, the rest of the conversation took a rather politically incorrect turn and cannot be reproduced here. I took gymnastics lessons as a kid. I must remember those well – I still end up with my foot in my mouth pretty often.
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However, this conversation brought to the fore a phenomenon that has baffled me for the last many years: the aspiration to be what you are not. I have spent at least ten years’ worth of blessings and good karma praying for straight hair at the same time that the worldwide sales of curling irons were hitting the sky.
And then there’s tanning. Here I am, from a nation of one billion obsessed with fairness, watching amused as half a campus is sprawled across the lawn sunning itself. I must make it clear that I am not complaining at all – chiseled bronzed bodies are a pleasant distraction. (Note to self: Stop being such a cougar sketchy grad student!)
Anyhoo, my friends find it amusing that I find their love of tanning amusing. This is my attempt to put things in perspective: a small insight into modern Indian culture. Here’s a small sample of the spiel we are fed day after day. Please note that this is one of the more subtle ads for fairness creams out there. After all, it merely hammers home the message that white is right. The cannonballs, sadly, are not on Youtube.
Transcript: A Rajnikant-lookalike priest and his daughter accidentally walk into a room full of rather unattractive bitchy receptionists who claim that their kennel is actually a “modern beauty company” and turn the father-daughter duo away, throwing in some snide remarks about the girl’s looks. Just when you expected the Rajnikant lookalike to exact revenge in style and in the process dispel myths such as gravity, human bones and common sense, he pulls out a fairness formula from an ancient scripture instead. Voilà, the daughter is transformed into a radiant and successful.., uh, I didn’t exactly understand what she achieved.
An assortment of other ads peddles fairness creams as a stairway to “US-returned” bridegrooms, a brilliant acting career and hold your breath, a position as a cricket commentator (Just add Tandoori chicken and there, you have the Dummy’s guide to India). What next? Fair & Lovely for world peace?
After over twenty years in a country where everyone wants their share of Vitamin F, how can I not be amused when people want to give it away?
Either Nature has a sense of humour or a master plan. Maybe this is a diabolical scheme to reduce differences in the world, a strange dynamic that shall be revealed in due course. Or maybe it is just the flux of dissatisfaction that will never let the human race just be.
