Gloom descends on the family when a girl child is born, and if she is dark, the gloom takes on a deeper hue of woe. Yes, black is not fashionable on skin in our country! But the formula for beauty keeps changing over time. Kalidasa's Shakuntala might never make it to the list of beautiful women in today's skin-on-bone trend. For, she was not the stick insect today's beauty icons are. Neither will anybody be enchanted by the dusky Queen Cleopatra, for dark skin does not feature in the beauty itinerary anymore. Who determines the equation for beauty? Is it the Einstein in the entertainment or cosmetic industry? Whoever or whatever it is, a dark complexion is agonisingly frowned upon and designated a low ranking on the beauty scale today. Look up the matrimonial columns: wanted fair, wheatish complexion; and how about the cosmetic industry that is inundated with fairness creams and lotions. I have heard dark skinned girls lament that it takes double the effort for them to make their presence felt or their voices heard, for they do not possess what it takes to make that proverbial first impression. Young girls with dark complexion suffer as much mental agony as do the overweight ones. For the moment, it is comforting to summon those yet valid reassuring thoughts: a popular one being that most successful people in human history were not beautiful, and the wise inference that beauty and brains do not necessarily go together.
Yet another consolation is that beauty equations are ever transient, and the ingredients that constitute beauty are also constantly redefined. Listen to this tale a little bird told me: a woman woke up one fine morning and discovered to her amazement that she had grown a tail overnight. She tried to pull it away, but it wouldn't come off. She tried to cut it off: Ouch! And then to her utter dismay, she heard the doorbell ring. What should she do? Open the door and reveal her shame? No way! But the bell rang again and again and again....till she was persuaded to open the door, taking all caution to keep her backside out of sight. It happened to be the milkman. As he turned away, she was astounded to discover that even he had a tail. My god, the milkman and I have tail. No sooner had she shut the door than the bell rang again. She opened the door a lightning crack and found the maid in time as never before. She quickly gave her the day off, and nearly fell off her balance to see that even the maid had a tail! Curious, she opened the door a bit wider and saw her neighbour drying clothes on the terrace, and she too had a tail! Now she mustered the courage to step out and found to her immense surprise and relief that everybody had tails. It is a story, so no questions, please. Now she begins to compare her tail with that of the others. And mind you some of them had real beautiful tails. The local gossip told her that X's bride was not as pretty as was made out to be, but, God, you should see her tail! And that reminds me, continued the gossip, I have to go to town to buy some accessories for my tail. Which of course brings us to the beauty souk: tail creams, tail washes, tail cosmetic jewellery, tail grooming and even tail shaping!
Let us leave the story there. The point is that beauty lies, as famously said, in the eyes of the beholder, but also, like democracy, in a consensus of the majority. In a world where everybody has a tail, the one without it is considered physically handicapped. A dark complexion is at present assigned a subordinate position due to various social and political reasons. But, at the end of the day, whose is the last word on beauty? Let's imagine that God gave us the opportunity to redesign the human anatomy: we might, for all you know, do away with the oddly shaped ears, or the two holes that we call nostrils.
We might fix an eye at the back and one in the centre of the forehead. We might wish to hang our heart on our sleeve, or like the monkey in the folktale, leave the liver at home so that it will not get damaged when we indulge ourselves in the bar. In this case the room for improvement would turn out to be a real large one. There is no perfect formula for beauty and, hopefully, a dark skin shall not remain on the margin of the beauty page for long.
