Dark & Lovely - 4

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http://img1.nymag.com/imgs/daily/intelligencer/2014/10/14/14-michelle-obama.w529.h529.2x.jpg

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: 

http://www.dnaindia.com/entertainment/report-my-sympathies-to-the-minister-who-lost-his-job-hema-malini-1822837

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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Dark & Lovely - 3

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http://im.rediff.com/movies/2012/may/07sl9.jpg

To say that I am not color-conscious is to be a damned hypocrite.

When I turned about 5, I was made aware by sly comparisons that I was not as fair as my paternal cousins most of whom were fair and handsome. And that gave me an inferiority complex that persists. So were most of my half dozen siblings. To make matters worse, both my parents were fair and handsome...their kids had a recessive gene...our maternal uncles were what were called: chaamana chaaya (pale brown).

Then and there I decided that I would marry, if at all, a fair girl, cateris paribus, which I did. And luckily my son and his daughter turned out to be as fair as vanilla ice cream:

http://images6.fanpop.com/image/photos/34700000/White-Vanilla-Ice-Cream-white-34727364-600-447.jpg

Ishani was born late one evening in Nellore. And my wife, myself, and my son were in Hyderabad at home waiting anxiously for the news of Ishani's safe arrival on this earth. And Ishani's auntie was our foreign correspondent staying onsite outside the surgery at Nellore and speaking to us minute by minute. And when the baby was ultimately brought out to be exhibited to the waiting relatives, her auntie broke us the news thus:

"It is a girl! Oh, she is as fair as Snow White!!! And her ample hair is jet black!!!"

In 1978, I was standing outside the labor room at Gudur waiting for the arrival of my sister's baby at 2, in pouring rain. When the news arrived that a boy was born, my mom went in and came out after ten minutes and said I could then go in and visit the mother and child. By when I went in, my sister (whose hubby was the fairest of all) was watching her new arrival lying beside her. And when she saw me, she instinctively looked at me and then at her son back and forth a couple of times. And I asked her:

"So you are worried if your son is as brown as his uncle instead of his dad!!!"

And she blushed and said:

"I wish he would get your brains instead of your brown"

Fat lot of a consolation that was for me. For the record, he turned out to be not as fair as his dad nor as dark as his uncle...some mixture there. And he is now a physician (instead of a physics teacher) in England. And when his son was born recently, his dad called me up and said:

"I wish my grandson would be as talented as you are!"

which made me conclude that the chap is not as dark as I am...

When I grew up to be a professor of physics a IIT KGP, I was sharing for two decades office with my colleague, DB, who was a shade darker than me but more talented. So we got on well enough till one day he returned from Calcutta and bragged that someone there compared his looks with Soumitra Chatterjee's:

http://static.cinemagia.ro/img/db/actor/00/56/04/soumitra-chatterjee-659938l.jpg

That gave me a sudden pang of inferiority complex again after two decades. 

Luckily, however, that evening a student whom I gave a fantastic (though a wee undeserving) reco entered our office and announced that he got admission and TA into Chicago Univ, and gifted me a copy of Anurag Mathur's 'Inscrutable American'. And when I flipped it I discovered his scribble: 

"To Sir with Love"

http://cps-static.rovicorp.com/2/Open/Sony%20Pictures/To%20Sir,%20With%20Love/_derived_jpg_q90_600x800_m0/ToSirWithLove-Still1_CR.jpg?partner=allmovie_soap

And I showed it to DB and he was duly smitten with envy ;)


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Dark & Lovely - 2

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http://i.ytimg.com/vi/Ojy_UgBZbxo/maxresdefault.jpg

Yesterday I was talking about the senior Yadav MP from Bihar who found himself waxing eloquent in the Lok Sabha about the body and skin of South Indian ladies attributing their lure to him to their training in dance.

Well, he is as innocent of my real South Indian ladies as I am about the village belles of his Bihar. His knowledge is gleaned from the few Hindi movies he must have watched with ogle-boggles in which several South Indian actresses have made it good.

Last night I was reading a review of a recently published book titled:

"Unforgettable: The Iconic Women of South Indian Cinema"

In it there is this curious fact that many South Indian actresses made it good in Bollywood but not South Indian actors. The list of such actresses is formidable including oldies like  TR Rajkumari, Padmini, B. Saroja Devi, Jamuna, Jayalalita, Jaya Prada, Sridevi and Vyjayantimala; and later ones like Hema Malini, Waheeda Rehman, Rekha, Vidya Balan, not to talk of perhaps Aishwarya Rai.

The reviewer writes:

"...female stars from the South look like goddesses who seem to have jumped out of calendars hanging in their living rooms. Most of these women, apart from being very talented performers, have voluptuous figures and incredibly beautiful eyes. They mesmerise the northern male. The fact that almost all of them have trained as classical dancers also helps since singing and dancing are essential components of our films."

The reviewer is a Patel. What is ok for a Guju in print is not ok for a Yadav in speech in parliament.

He also writes:

"...a north Indian filmgoer's idea of good looks does not include the southern male --- medium height, dark features..."

Well, times have changed a bit with the advent of the youtube.  

The young chap at the header of this post had his fifteen minutes of fame not only in South India but across Indian and abroad.

Something there for tomorrow...


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Dark & Lovely - 1

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http://docs.testplant.com/sites/default/files/images/eggPlant-v12.png

Of late there has been a lot of brouhaha in our political circles about the skin color of ladies, both south and north Indian and Italian and Nigerian to boot.

It all started with a senior (read old) parliamentarian belonging to the famed Krishna clan...Krishna himself is as dark as a cumulonimbus cloud as his name indicates...maybe that's why.

This guy was speaking in the Lok Sabha about the insurance bill. And suddenly he found himself speaking about the color and texture of the skin of South Indian ladies...there are no women in this blog...all are ladies.

This reminded me of a faculty meeting in the Phy Dept of IIT KGP in the 1970s. The topic under discussion was teaching and how to improve it. The agenda was an outcome of students' feedback that phy teachers were the worst of the lot.

There were senior professors like HNB, SDM and GBM adorning the front benches. And us juniors were sipping tea and smoking fags surreptitiously in the last bench. As expected, the senior bhadralok started lecturing the juniors as to how to rivet the attention of the students. And we were smiling...except HNB, who was known as a world-class teacher, the other two were as innocent of teaching as a fish struggling on the sand. 

Suddenly there was this intrepid backbencher SVD (known as Shivajee because of his Maharashtra ancestry) who could stand this no further. He ground his fag under his shoe and shouted:

"All will be well if the eloquent senior professors go to the class prepared to teach physics and stop stammering and start rambling like street-smart magicians"

There was a stunned silence and the meeting took a break for snacks. And everyone left one by one...snacks were the draw.

Coming back to our Lok Sabha, the veteran speaker is reputed to have said something like:

"North Indian ladies have fair skins alright but the dark South Indian ladies have great bodies because they dance well"

Upon which the lady minister of education, who is trying hard to polish up the fading systems of IITs and abolish the UGC, took offence and gently reminded the senior speaker of the insurance agenda and asked him to please not talk about the skin of the ladies south or north.

Upon which the speaker pounced on her and chided the junior-most MP:

"I know what you are!"

I am sure the speech was in upcountry Hindi and untranslatable. 

Upon which the gents sitting (and not sleeping) in their seats simpered instead of coming to the rescue of the lady minister. 

This must have brought tears to the lady (if any were left after the saas-bahu serials), reminding me of the Telugu saying about the lady who cried after being beat up by her hubby:

"I din't mind my hubby beating me but I can't stand the laughter of my sisters-in-law"

The said lady minister had already had her bit of spat with another ex-parliamentarian:


http://indiatoday.intoday.in/story/sanjay-nirumpam-remark-against-smriti-irani-irks-many/1/238786.html

Well, that's for today...see how I have rambled like a senior professor of phy at IIT KGP...


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Forgot how to blog

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Well, I am alive and kicking, sort of.

That was a long leave for introspection like our own Shehzada...no trace of him yet.

Many things have happened in these 3-month absence from the goofy space.

I lost my mom (92) in January. In all her 92 years that I know, she was bedridden only on her last two days on this earth. And she kept her brain as fresh as ever. 

Ishani has graduated from her kindergarten Lilly School and they had a fantastic Graduation Ceremony. On behalf of her class she was asked to make a speech of 8 lines. And she did it better than I ever did...she had 2 full days to prepare for her 'impromptu' valedictory address before a mike and a hall-full audience.

And she has started going to her new school in a school bus. So no more driving duties for me...I see her off at 7.30 AM and welcome her at 1.30 PM.

Well, though I have been down with the familiar bronchial problems I haven't been altogether lazy...idle man's brain.

I have composed a Shatakam (100 verses) in flat 25 days (and nights). Unfortunately they are all in Telugu with impeccable prosody calling for strict rhythm and rhyme. The Shatakam is dedicated to my eldest brother-in-law, Sri G. Ranga Rao, IAS. And as you can expect, all of the verses are political satire on current affairs. And each 4-line verse ends with the same last line having my B-i-L's name in it. For those few readers who are well-versed in Telugu, here is a sample:

1  38. Warm weather is due to hot winds says Weather Report:

వేడి గాలి వల్ల వచ్చు తాప మనురు

వచ్చు మబ్బు వల్ల వర్ష మనురు

వెఱ్ఱి బాగులోళ్ళు వెదరు పండితులుర

వెంకటాద్రి  సుతుడ  వినుర రంగ

Well, that is for today...don't know when the next post will be...que sera  sera




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Ishani turns Five

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Sikand's Precept - Repeat Telecast

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There was a great teacher of Classical Physics by name M. S. Sikand at IIT KGP. He was 14 years older to me, and I learned a lot of Physics from him one-to-one, which helped me greatly in my own teaching.

But now at 72, I forgot all Physics, willy-nilly.

But he taught me something else in one brief sentence, which helped me more than anything else in life and which I never forgot till today. He said, apropos of nothing:

"Sastryjee, everyone from the sweeper to the Director has some power in them. Recognize it, respect it and use it for your benefit."

I returned to KGP along with my wife on a short visit 5 years after my retirement; and I deeply felt the wonderful fruits of his invaluable precept.


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...Posted by Ishani

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