A brown girl’s thoughts!!

“I don’t want to be out in the sun for too long”, said, my six-year-old because then I would turn dark and the statement made by him made me  immediately narrow my eyes on him.

The obsession to be white skinned is world wide and its funnier in India because right from application of chemical loaded creams to application of easily available grocery items, we Indians have a hack for everything.

Being a full-blown Indian myself, I have tried some of these hacks  to reduce sun tanning, to saying “au revoir” to acne and obviously going through at least a dozen of these hacks while I was to be married. Phew! It’s sometimes worst than the pain of waxing away unwanted hair!

See, I deviated from the topic again, yes being an overly honest and emotional person can be challenging, you tend to flip from one topic to another in micro-seconds! So, coming back to the point that fixation with being fair can be dangerous and then it doesn’t matter what stature you are at.

Take the case of the how the “bird box racism”, went viral in the year 2018. The world always prefers a certain class of people over others, whether its how you look or how you dress to how influential you are or appear to be!

I strongly believe that a person’s talent and education should be of utmost importance when judging whether they are suitable for something or not. We time and again teach our children about equality and then we roll our eyes if they make friends with someone not as good as them.We are taught lessons of history where, good won over the evil, lessons that talk about freedom and even more historic lessons about righteousness that take you to deep slumber. A daughter is her parents princess and a son their prince however we still color code genders.

Michael Harriot has written a great blog about bird box racism which you can read here bird box racism and believe me, its not just racism I could relate too, it was the differentiation, the classification of people based on a certain category that irks me up.The way we either go wide eyed or shut our eyes at someone’s skin show and color.

We made numerous movies about self acceptance, about loving yourself, about patriotism, romance and everything else but then the bird box, still exists! We talk about growing leaps and bounds in terms of technology and education but I wonder CARTOSAT-3 would be able to capture images of education doing no good for certain people. Imagine being caught deeply digging your nose in public or your image being made viral like that of that Aunty who ridiculed girls on wearing skirts!!

But who am I to judge and create a hula about it on my social media, I am after all a brown girl?

A brown girl with a mushy heart and sunshine in her eyes. A brown girl that has a sleeping devil in her soul that grins every time she gives it back to someone who very well deserved it, a brown girl who burnt in the fire of racism and came out even more brown!!