un-Fair and Lovely

I've been meaning to write about this for a really long time. I'm really concerned about which century some people think they live in.

Have you seen the fairness cream ads that have been playing on TV? I can't believe that such balderdash is actually allowed to go on air. I mean, what is that s**t?

Apparently, powered with fairness cream, women can reach the pinnacles of human achievement. Potential husbands are all over them, they become commmentators for cricket matches overnight, film directors jump with unalloyed glee when they see them walking on the street. That's not all! Coming soon - The Fairness Cream Girls will be seen: conquering Mt. Everest, doing the salsa on the moon (without oxygen), building the first ever Time Machine (to transport them back to the present day from the 'Dark Ages'), and many more such wondrous feats that are only possible when you apply generous amounts of fairness cream.

And recently, I heard an ad on the radio that really took the cake. Believe it or not, there is now something called a Fairness Meter which actually measures your complexion. I guess it's a device that tells you that you are 8.56645 on the Fairness Index, so you know you have a superior complexion, maybe to help you achieve a superiority complex. Boy, has science taken us places or what.

At the end of the day, I know that in spite of everything, people still buy the stuff. Heck, even men are buying fairness cream. But I can't help thinking, doesn't this encourage discrimination and inequality? When you say that you can do big things if you're of a fair complexion, don't you say that if you're dark, you're doomed? Is that a message we want to send out to the people? Our aim should be to be as progressive as we can, and shun anything that holds us back from advancement, especially those ideas that became obsolete in the 19th century.

On the other hand, if you can't be strong enough to put an end to the propagation of such retrograde concepts, then don't be hypocritical either - don't push for greater benefits for the backward classes when you're doing nothing about mass media propaganda that encourages people to stay backward.