Friday, April 10, 2015

Dark & Lovely - 4

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Much before the current old yadav spoke wildly about the good bodies of south Indian ladies, there was this other yadav who once boasted:

"As long as aloo is there in samosa, Lalu will be there in Bihar"

Unfortunately there are still aloos in samose but this cow-cruncher is nowhere in Bihar politics. This rumbustious kid boasted that he would make the roads of his Bihar as smooth as a southee actress's cheeks...some cheek that! But, the lady just laughed it away...film stars and politicians love to joust one another...all they crave is publicity.

And then there is this yet another yadav kid from UP who dismissed his brahmin minister for cracking the same joke...this yadav doesn't seem to tolerate competition: 









All yadavs and kurmis and bcs of the north are now jelling together under a vast bowl to rediscover their place in the sun which is stolen by a gujju threatening their very existence. But all yadavs forget that their entire clan got drowned in the Arabian Sea along with their Dvaraka which happens to be in Gujerat.

Well, that is how political irony goes.

With a couple of honorable exceptions, the entire India, north, south, east, and west is obsessed with the fair skin of their girls. In my childhood there appeared the first ad for Lux soaps which featured many film stars who revealed the secret of their glowing skin...viz Lux.

All girls of my village fell for these Lux calendar stars and saved pennies of their pocket money to buy half of a Lux soap...the other half went to their moms. Dads were happy for several reasons like the saleability of their dot products...no way...

The limit was 50 years later when my wife discovered a tube of cream in the purse of our young housemaid who had a glowing skin that was as dark as mine. The ad for it is fatuous: 





http://s1.hubimg.com/u/2992396_f520.jpg



Nothing came out of it though...when last heard, she is still single.

There was this Bengali professor at IIT KGP who returned lock stock and barrel one day from London where he had a flourishing business of smart materials for two decades and more. When asked why he left England and returned to his home country leaving all his business, he replied:

"I decided to get back the night my 12-year daughter said to me...'papa! you are a wizard in material science; can't you invent a cream that makes me as fair as my English classmates?' "

In the 1960s there came up this weird slogan:

"Black is Beautiful!"

engineered by the blacks of the US. It went wild and all of us who bought black shoes instead of brown used to say:

"Black is Beautiful!"

That shows how slogans get twisted out of shape. 

I guess all kids...certainly all smiling babes are beautiful whatever their skin color, texture, pallor, or warts. 




http://www.scientificamerican.com/sciam/cache/file/42234F79-B5F1-4F49-B66D5D747D34D278.jpg





This is similar to the Maugham statement in Painted Veil:

"Beauty is also a gift of God. You should be thankful if you have it and, if you don't, you should be thankful that others have it for your pleasure...beauty is not in the body but in the soul"

By that I mean that every kid, girl or boy or man or lady, black, brown or white looks divine when they smile out of their inner happiness oozing out to enchant all of us...some preaching that...sorry!


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