Raju Korti
In the run up to the pivotal issue here is an apocryphal story that I read in my childhood. In his supreme wisdom and fairness (!) God had "blessed" every human being with a fair skin. On an impulse, one day he decided to find out for himself who worshipped Him truly. In a large cooking pot that had boiling oil in it, he asked each one to jump in it if they sincerely loved him. Those who loved him did so without thinking of the consequences and turned dark because of the boiling oil. The others weren't true in their love for Him and dithered. So they remained fair. Actually, God hadn't intended anyone to die in that test. It was his way of finding out who genuinely loved him.
The story with all its loftiness, it occurred to me much later, was meant to appease and comfort dark people like me who nursed a green-eyed monster against the fair-skinned. The conviction that my ebony skin was a distinct disadvantage only grew with age and contrary to the concocted story, I never lost an opportunity to crib to God about the unfair deal that He had meted out to me. All those well meant and grand lectures about inner beauty being the real beauty did nothing to shake my deep-rooted diffidence.
A few movies and Mills and Boon tripe later, my sensibilities were overtaken and how! I suddenly realized that the hero had to be invariably always tall, dark and handsome and make the "fair sex" swoon if you ignore the male chauvinism that came through. The unimpeachable evidence came when an extremely fair and good looking young thing took fancy to me in my college days not because of my dark skin but inspite of it. The credit of course went to all those painstakingly earned good grades and I felt like a snake who had shed its superficial skin and was suddenly proud of its reptilian cool. The brooding, tentative and wilted Me gave way to a spunky new man with a matching body language. By fluke or by design I happened to bump into people -- mostly women -- who told me that their fancies rather lay with dark men. For the first time, I felt no trepidation walking into a photo studio.
I was also aware that the dark tribe was euphemistically called dusky or wheat-complexioned though it beat me how such a poor consolation tactic worked. It began to sink in when the Time magazine did an in-depth story "Black Power", citing how the Dark were standing up to be counted and adding feathers to the American cap. My metamorphosis was complete at that point. The dark race was like a rubber ball. The harder it dashed to the ground, the higher it rose.
The wheel of wisdom turned a full circle, I seriously suspected that there was little weight, let alone any justification in the racial prejudice. If that were so, the South Africans wouldn't have courted Mandela as President after reducing a good part of his life to a rubble in the confines of a gaol. For that matter, nor would have supermodels like Heidi Klum chosen to marry a black hunk like Seal. Lest you get wrong signals, it is not my case here to pontificate on individual choices but to dispel misgivings on the hype that surrounds the colour of the skin.
Nina Davuluri, the first woman of Indian extraction to win America's national crown further altered the complexion of this social discourse. Far from being a front-runner for the Miss America crown with no preliminary wins or early scholarships, the chocolate coloured 24-year-old hogged little attention from the make-or-mar Media in the run up to the pageant's dying hours.
The knee-jerk reactions deluging the social networking sites to her unexpected but resounding victory showed that racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism. It is the notion of ascribing moral, social or political significance to a man's genetic lineage -- the notion that an individual's intellect and character are produced and transmitted by his internal body chemistry.
It is another story that the feisty girl was unfazed by the racial slurs hurled at her and returned the favour in kind by riposting that she was an American first and foremost.
Behind all that racial bias is a raging, jaundiced fret. And that brings to me to the cooked up story I related to you at the outset. Racism isn't born. It is taught.
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| Dark and Beautiful: Nina Davuluri |
The story with all its loftiness, it occurred to me much later, was meant to appease and comfort dark people like me who nursed a green-eyed monster against the fair-skinned. The conviction that my ebony skin was a distinct disadvantage only grew with age and contrary to the concocted story, I never lost an opportunity to crib to God about the unfair deal that He had meted out to me. All those well meant and grand lectures about inner beauty being the real beauty did nothing to shake my deep-rooted diffidence.
A few movies and Mills and Boon tripe later, my sensibilities were overtaken and how! I suddenly realized that the hero had to be invariably always tall, dark and handsome and make the "fair sex" swoon if you ignore the male chauvinism that came through. The unimpeachable evidence came when an extremely fair and good looking young thing took fancy to me in my college days not because of my dark skin but inspite of it. The credit of course went to all those painstakingly earned good grades and I felt like a snake who had shed its superficial skin and was suddenly proud of its reptilian cool. The brooding, tentative and wilted Me gave way to a spunky new man with a matching body language. By fluke or by design I happened to bump into people -- mostly women -- who told me that their fancies rather lay with dark men. For the first time, I felt no trepidation walking into a photo studio.
I was also aware that the dark tribe was euphemistically called dusky or wheat-complexioned though it beat me how such a poor consolation tactic worked. It began to sink in when the Time magazine did an in-depth story "Black Power", citing how the Dark were standing up to be counted and adding feathers to the American cap. My metamorphosis was complete at that point. The dark race was like a rubber ball. The harder it dashed to the ground, the higher it rose.
The wheel of wisdom turned a full circle, I seriously suspected that there was little weight, let alone any justification in the racial prejudice. If that were so, the South Africans wouldn't have courted Mandela as President after reducing a good part of his life to a rubble in the confines of a gaol. For that matter, nor would have supermodels like Heidi Klum chosen to marry a black hunk like Seal. Lest you get wrong signals, it is not my case here to pontificate on individual choices but to dispel misgivings on the hype that surrounds the colour of the skin.
Nina Davuluri, the first woman of Indian extraction to win America's national crown further altered the complexion of this social discourse. Far from being a front-runner for the Miss America crown with no preliminary wins or early scholarships, the chocolate coloured 24-year-old hogged little attention from the make-or-mar Media in the run up to the pageant's dying hours.
The knee-jerk reactions deluging the social networking sites to her unexpected but resounding victory showed that racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism. It is the notion of ascribing moral, social or political significance to a man's genetic lineage -- the notion that an individual's intellect and character are produced and transmitted by his internal body chemistry.
It is another story that the feisty girl was unfazed by the racial slurs hurled at her and returned the favour in kind by riposting that she was an American first and foremost.
Behind all that racial bias is a raging, jaundiced fret. And that brings to me to the cooked up story I related to you at the outset. Racism isn't born. It is taught.
dearest raju garu,
ReplyDeleteyou really know how to tell a story and transport the reader to actually feel guilty of not having trusted god.
this world has been cruel all along and it is nothing new if some one is discriminated due to color.
the world has lost all tolerance level's and as if that is not enough, it has also started taking offense to anything that is said. one has to be always correct according to others.
miss america just showed us the way forward.
raju garu one blog a month will ensure - that no rust forms around your pen, though i dont believe that you can ever form rust around you.
we are all here to ensure that you keep shining all the while.
ramesh narain kurpad.