With Valentine’s day right behind us, you must sick of seeing roses, and flowers and all the gushy lovey-dovey stuff on blogs from all over the world. I myself have written many such posts and actually had one more pink bridal set lined up for this week – I just couldn’t bring myself to write and publish it. I wanted to talk about something real that happens during this time of the year – Judging people by the way they look and why Fair is not always lovely.
At our very core we human beings are judgmental – we judge people on how they look, on how they speak, the language that they are comfortable speaking in, and how they dress. We judge them based on their lifestyle, the color of their skin, the company they keep and even the car that they drive or the lack of it. We judge all the time. But do we like being judged? No we don’t, but we have to accept the fact we do get judged all day, everyday.
Not just experience, but even statistics say the same. The Nihar Naturals #IAmCapable survey conducted by Nielsen India reveals that :
a. 69% of Indian men agree that their judgement of women is based on their looks.
b. 64% of women agree that the judgments passed on them have affected their ability to reach their true potential.
c. 70%of women agree that majority of judgments on women are from family members or friends rather than strangers.
d. 72% of women agree that working women face more judgments on their looks or their clothes than housewives.
People who know me well (personally) know that I give the least amount of importance to my personal appearance. I do step up my game for occasions and functions, but I dress very simply, just for comfort on an everyday basis. I wear a salwar-kurta or jeans and tee shirt, flat slippers, I tie up my hair and to use a famous Indian taunt “dress like a behenji” (A once respectful term for elder sister, now means an average, unfashionable, ordinary plain Jane, who is slow thinking, ultra conservative and extremely uncool). Again people who know me, know, that I am anything but one. Everyday when I step out on my house I know that my students and colleagues are going to notice what I am wearing, notice how my hair is done, whether I have waxed my hands or groomed my eyebrows and I know that they will judge me based on that. But if I let their judgement – good or bad bother me then I am never going to be happy and not get any work done either.
Being a very fair skinned girl in a society that is obsessed with fairness and fairness creams, I have faced my unique share of judgments. I have had friends, colleagues, students and random strangers walk up to me and tell me how lucky I am to have such fair skin. This ridicule and sarcasm laced compliment always puts me off. In a society where families want “Thin fair brides” people cannot figure why I am still single. Assumptions like I have no problems in my life because I am fair or everybody loves me because of that or I or it doesn’t matter how I dress, I’ll be successful because I am fair are very irritating.
And I am not even White, I am just yellow.
In India it is almost a crime to talk about this as 1000’s of beautiful, strong, intelligent women are marginalized for being dark. I hate the very concept of judging someone based on the color of their skin. But everybody speaks out for the beautiful dark skinned people nobody talks about the average fair skinned ones. So Should we all just hide?
I was so frustrated in October last year that I took to commenting on Facebook about this. I raised this not so simple question – Am I jealous of you because you have a car, a house, more money, thick hair or spotless skin? Then why should you be jealous of me or consider me even arrogant because I am fair? Needless to say the post got both brickbats as well as silent nods of approval, but not many wanted to answer my question.
Fair skinned folks do not have any easy life my friends; if we don’t wear a strong sunscreen our face turns red, we need to invest in creams as well just to reduce intensity of the color of spots on our skin or get labelled as cheetahs. Our facial hair is more visible and so do the blackheads and white heads making us look unsightly. We put on more layers of makeup than we care to admit and our photoshop skills are pretty great from years of editing our pictures.
We are far from being pleased when people do not want to stand next to us in photographs or that we look as though a light bulb went off in our faces in most pictures.
Believe me when I say this, I owe neither my success nor my failures to the color of my skin. My behenji attire, my greasy black hair, my acne ridden fair skin, my hard working nature and the fact that I can voice my opinion on almost every topic ( I am well read!) is what makes me unique, I wouldn’t change it or myself for anybody.
“I’m breaking stereotypes based on appearance by sharing my experience for the #IAmCapable activity at BlogAdda in association with Nihar Naturals.”
I hope you found it interesting
Cheers
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