The Ethnic India Where Is It

Why do we have only fair personalities in the ads:
When we browse through the magazines we come across not the brown beauty of India, but some fair personalities with whom u cannot relate. Even a drink is served by a fair foreigner and not our beauties in the flight advertisement, it is the fair ones who get selected for the beauty contests.

Come to think of it the brown girls are more photogenic and Indian in feature, which when explored have better viewing, and one can relate more better with them. May be a fair person is nice to look at, but what happens to the ethnicity of India, we are not concentrating on these.

Even lakme has a wide variety of shades for the brown’s in India, when a cosmetic company catering to the asian crowd should keep this in mind, whether it is the clothes or the jewelry, as u browse through one can point out that it is asian, like wise they should produce brown beauties to adorn them and not seek for the fair ones.

I do not have anything against the fair ones, but these ads make the dark one’s run behind creams and herbs to improve their lot, even in the film “traffic signal” we see the boy going mad when he finds the fairness cream actually does not work, come to think of it the company is actually hood winking the mass, but none to take them to task.

Now coming to the matrimonial market in India, these ads of so many years have tuned the guys to go for fair and beautiful, that we come across, so then what about the dark beauties, don’t they get a chance anywhere. When one thinks of Africa we never think of fair personalities, like wise in India too we can think of more brown beauties than fair ones. Even if the boy likes the dark girl, his family are of the opinion that he should have got a nice fair girl and so on, which gives complex to the girl and on this pretext she is being slaved, threatened that the boy would be re-married if she did not behave and so on.

When they project the poverty of India we notice that these beauties right from the infant stage are focused upon, and the foreign viewers get to see the real India, but shaded with many a thing missing, and our image goes right down, I remember my cousin of America had to say, why aren’t there any snakes and elephants on the road. The picture that they know is only that which has been projected to highlight India.

In this urban city now we notice that even the maid is picked fair, to go along with their décor, it is a pity, that there is nothing to sport this view that they are better workers or contributors. Hope the beauticians, the hairstylists, the clothing industries keep the true texture and color of India to improvise them rather than projecting the fair one’s making giving more Indians the complex about their color. The racism is not only in America but also the world over.. regards sunkan

Dear Sunkan,
I agree with you that the fairness cream ads give a wrong message to everyone. But I dont think that they are responsible for the skin colour discrimination. How long do you think that these fairness creams have come in the existence in India. But these matrimonial ads have been in India since ages. This mentality is deeply embibed in the people's minds since long long times. I am surprised and (Happy!!!!) to see that many such ads seek fair boy as well.
Also I feel the trend is changing nowadays. If you notice that so many beauty queens have beautiful dusky brown complexion and have left the fair ones behind them. To name a few are Diana Hyden, Lara Dutta, Priyanka Chopra. Even the most popular, liked and topmost heroines in bollywood are Rani Mukherji and Kajol and others. Also many ads like Tanishq etc have brown beauties to adorn their products. All the airlines see the confidence and other qualities in the girls but not the skin colour. This will be a li'l unfair on the part of fair girls to say that brown girls are more photogenic and Indian Both can look beautiful,photogenic and ofcourse Indian. There are many regions in India where the skin colour is fair but still they are Indian and have Indian features.
My feeling is that fairness cream and many such ads are inspired by People's mentality but not the other way round.