3 posts tagged “india”

Actor Shah Rukh Khan, Bollywood's answer to Tom Cruise, has recently come under fire for promoting Fair and Handsome, a skin-lightening cream targeted at men and sold in India and Indian shops around the world (the ad is viewable on Youtube here and speaks for itself). The ads for Fair and Lovely, the original cream for women from which F&H was spun off, aren't much better. Here's a particularly horrible one I found in English (with equally cringe-worthy runners up viewable in the related videos at the end):

The obsession with fairness is fed from all directions. Bollywood actors and actresses, the accepted benchmark for beauty, are invariably light-skinned (and don't tell me Bipasha Basu is "dark"). I can probably count on one hand the number of matrimonial ads I've seen that don't contain the word "fair", either to make the spouse-seeker seem more attractive or to specify what kind of husband or wife they're looking for.

I find it amazing that in this day and age, while we all boast happily about how modern and progressive India is, attitudes of this kind are still so widespread. And it's not just India - skin lightening treatments are big business everywhere from China to the Caribbean. I'm not sure if it's some prolonged post-colonial hangover or if it reaches back even farther than that.

Every culture has its own yardsticks of beauty, whether it's complexion or body shape or foot size, and most of us are hard pressed to measure up to our society's ideal of "beautiful". That exclusivity is one reason why beauty is so ardently worshipped. But in a world that's come leaps and bounds in recent decades in matters of race, measuring someone's beauty and worth by their skin colour seems unacceptable to me.

Someone on the Aussies' mailing list at Microsoft sent an email today announcing that the first Baker's Delight (rebranded as Cobs Bakery in North America) in the US is now open in Bellevue, and that for the whole of today, they are giving out free bread. I got excited, I rang up Al, he got excited too, and we headed straight over to get our freebie.

Now, I love a good pull-apart as much as the next person, but if I were still living in Sydney, I don't know if I would be dropping everything and running out the door all in the name of a newly opened Baker's Delight store. I don't think I went there more than once every couple of months when I lived at home.

I've noticed similar behaviour with my Canuck friends. Anytime a trip to Vancouver is mentioned, the first question is "Oh, did you go to Tim Horton's*? Did you bring back timbits?! Mmmm... I can just smell that coffee now!" And then everyone nods thoughtfully and says how much they wish Tim Horton's would expand into the US. Now, I know from direct experience that the coffee at TH's is totally shite, and I am pretty sure that, if subjected to a double blind test, any Canadian would agree with me. But that's my point. You're not tasting the coffee or the cheesymite scroll. You're tasting the nostalgia.

I realise that these are fairly superficial examples, but I don't think there's anything quite like moving away from your homeland to make you view it more positively. I think in a new place, something in you instinctively yearns for the familiar. And being around different people makes you realise the ways in which your own culture is unique and special. It's helped me to understand why my parents and their friends hold so fiercely onto their culture 20+ years after moving to Australia. I admire the fact that despite bringing me up on the other side of the world, they were able to instill in me the same pride and respect for my Indian heritage, and in turn accept and accommodate my more Westernised world view. As a result I really have been able to enjoy the best of both worlds, and my life has been so much richer for it.

*Canada's answer to Starbucks

Looks like Nike is aggressively targeting the Indian market these days. This is a bloody awesome ad :)