The New Indian Express
Saturday, April 24, 2010
zeitgeist
Your Saturday
Magazine
Practically
Marzipan
Aishwarya Subramanian
A fairer,
but less
interesting
world
A
few years ago I returned
from a summer holiday
several shades darker than
when I had left. I found my new
tan fascinating; it had traced the
rather unusual outline of my new
watch onto my wrist, and for a few
days I chose not to wear a watch
so that people could see the tan
lines. A couple of days after I had
returned, though, I was visiting a
friend and her mother entered the
room. She was horrified when she
saw what my holiday had done,
especially when a look at my wrist
informed her of the extent of the
damage. That I was taking it so
lightly (even flaunting my dark-
ened skin!) made the whole situa-
tion even worse.
Many people will talk about the
racist and/or casteist implications
of the cosmetics industrys insis-
tence that fairness and beauty go
hand in hand. Others will point
out that our cultural obsession
with fairness pre-dates the indus-
try for as long as we can remem-
ber, fairness has been seen as a
desirable trait. If youre spectacu-
larly beautiful in every other way
(Bipasha Basu) or a mythical prin-
cess (Draupadi) dark skin is for-
giveable and trite comments about
dusky beauties can be made, but
otherwise being born on the wrong
side of wheatish (that euphe-
mistic staple of every matrimo-
nial advertisement) is not an at-
tractive trait.
Our cultural obsession
with fairness pre-dates
the industry for as
long as we can
remember, fairness
has been seen as a
desirable trait. The
obsession with
fairness is boring
And while the arguments that
it is racist and casteist are well
documented (and in my opinion
entirely accurate), what no one
seems to point out is this that
the obsession with fairness is in-
credibly boring.
I was startled to discover a cou-
ple of years ago that an anti-acne
cream that had been recommend-
ed to me had other effects as well.
The packaging proudly claimed
that in addition to preventing
spots, this wonderful product
would lighten my skin as well.
Since then Ive been reading the
backs of boxes of all sorts of
cosmetic products anti ageing
creams, anti-acne creams, prod-
ucts to tackle dryness, oiliness and
sunburn. A surprising number of
them carry the promise that the
product will also make you fairer
as a sort of delightful extra
something they take for granted
you will appreciate. And this is in
addition to the slew of advertise-
ments on the television where
various celebrities (of varying
genders and professions) shill the
regular fairness creams.
I have nightmare visions of a
world in which these products ac-
tually were effective and everyone
ended up exactly the same shade
of light peachy-pink. It is not an
interesting world. Right now,
though, we live in a place and time
where things like skin colour and
body shape are almost infinitely
varied. People and their bodies |
are fascinating. And the industry,
the celebrities who endorse it, and
everyone who buys into it, tells
their daughter not to go out in the
sun, or writes a matrimonial ad
with the word fair in it; these
entities not only have a pitifully
limited conception of beauty, but
they are also contributing to mak-
ing my world a less interesting
place. And thats terrible.
The writer is a student of English
literature. She blogs at http://bluelull-
aby.blogspot.com. You can reach her
at bluelullaby@gmail.com
Ever gone round and round the city up to four times, with two unnecessary
trips to Neelankarai and one to Guduvancheri, for two rupees?
The thin line between
bargaining and lunacy
K
: Dont feel bad.
S: Im not feeling bad. Im contem-
plating that very thin line that divides
alleged Awesome Bargaining Skills from com-
plete lunacy.
K: Im just saying you should have asked
me before buying that laptop. I could have got
you a really nice one, pucca quality for the
absolute best price ever.
S: 23 paisa.
K: Yes.
S: You could have got me a laptop for 23
paisa.
K: Yes.
S: Are you on drugs?
K: I seriously can. Company piece, full anti-
virus with twelve English movie DVDs that
havent been released abroad yet. All pucca
pucca. With free bag.
S: No warranty?
K: If you want a 10-year complete war-
ranty on everything you have to pay two
paisa extra.
S: If you can do all that, you are beyond
powerful and influential. You are magic. You
are Harry Potter.
K: I just know the right dealers. And these
dealers have godowns.
S: I know dealers who have godowns and
none of them sell laptops for 23 paisa.
K: Thats where my Awesome Bargaining
Skills come in. Its my skills that kills.
S: Do these skills involve crying? Do you
threaten to blow your nose on them if they
dont give you the laptop for 23 paisa?
K: Chee.
S: You throw a tantrum. You jump up and
down and say Give me the laptop for 23 paisa!
Give me give me give me!
K: I do have a technique, if
thats what you want to
know.
S: I do want to know. I want
Bringing up little girls in America the Andhra way
R
ecently, a friend gave a techie mum
this advice on raising her daughter:
She talks very loudly. Teach her to
talk softly, and not to talk too much.
After all, she is a girl. Oh boy is she in trouble,
I thought. just as other women friends went
on the offensive. How dare she put down little
girls? They have the right to be raised on par
with their brothers. Did coming to the US do
nothing to change her gender-bias?
Like me, they were frustrated to note that
well into the 21st century, halfway across the
globe from patriarchal India, many desi
women remain fettered by our gender-biased
upbringing. As we try to melt in to the West
and smelt our cultural identity just enough
to remain Indian, even as the passports turn
American, the socio-cultural chasms are of-
ten the more difficult ones to cross. Whats
more, with mothers being the primary care-
givers, the responsibility of raising confident
children falls to her.
Indian parents, particularly mothers, in
the Valley admit it is challenging to walk the
treacherous tightrope between raising con-
fident desi daughters, and upright ones at
that. Whatever that means in todays world.
Trying to stay Indian at heart, they motivate
multiverse
Conversations
Kuzhali Manickavel
is the author of Insects Are Just Like You and
Me Except Some of Them Have Wings. She
blogs at http://thirdworldghettovampire.
blogspot.com.
to know how you bring a laptop price down
from several thousands of rupees to 23 pai-
sa.
K: First I laugh in the dealers face when he
quotes his price. I go HAHAHAHA! like the
villain in a Tamil movie just before he rapes
someone. When I laugh, it says to the dealer
That price is absurd and it also says You
better rethink that price or I will END
you!!!
S: I will end you? What are you, some kind
of deadly punctuation mark?
K: Then I unleash my I Will End You !!! Look
Of Extreme Fear on the dealer.
S: Is that where your mouth hangs open and
it looks like youre going to sneeze?
K: HAHAHAHA!
S: Iyo.
K: This is the look that is so powerful
that if I wear sunglasses, I can be ar-
Silicon
Tales
Farwa Imam Ali
is a journalist based in the US.
silicontales@gmail.com
rested for concealing dangerous weapons.
S: HAHAHAHA!
K: Why you are laughing?
S: Sorry.
K: I once gave an old woman this look by
accident and she had a heart attack.
S: I have seen you give that look to people.
It looks like youve fallen asleep with your
mouth open.
K: With this look, I can make an auto driv-
er take me round and round the city twice
with one unnecessary drop at Guduvancheri.
Guess how much I will pay. Guess guess.
S: No.
K: Two rupees.
S: I can go round and round the city four
times with two unnecessary trips to Neelan-
karai and one unnecessary drop at Gudu-
vancheri for one rupee.
K: I bought a Blackberry for 50 paisa and
I get everything on it for free all the time
forever.
S: I found a Blackberry on the road that has
everything on it for free all the time forever.
K: My dental work picks up WiFi signals so
every time I touch something, it becomes
internet-enabled. Like if I touch a toaster. Or
a plastic spoon. Or a fish.
S: You can create internet-enabled fish.
K: Did I just go too far and lose this game?
S: You were already losing at the 23 paisa
laptop.
K: But I can really get you that though. Ab-
solute best price, pucca quality. Really.
illustration:
tuhin chakraborty
daughters to attend Bharatnatyam and clas-
sical music classes while the boys are initi-
ated in to the religion of cricket by fathers.
Wonder how sons would react if asked to take
the song and dance route to remain true to
their heritage?
So unless desi parents shelve their mental
blocks we will raise yet another generation
of girls who believe they are second class
citizens in a mans world. Never mind the
American passport. Many American-Indian
daughters admit they feel pressure when their
parents hold them up to standards different
from those of their American peers by virtue
of their Indian lineage. For example; as in
India, curfew timings (among other things)
vary for boys and girls.
Simply put, how we raise our little girls af-
fects the choices they make as women. As
evidence, a woman techie mentioned a survey
conducted by business consulting firm Bain
and Company reported in a leading Indian
daily. Apparently, from the people polled, men
(87 per cent) and women (91 per cent) agreed
that either sex could be a primary breadwin-
ner. But when it came to making career sacri-
fices, nearly 77 per cent men felt sure their
partner would compromise on their career for
7
Gitanjali Kolanad
A Fine Line
is a Toronto-based dancer,
choreographer and writer.
gitakolanad@yahoo.ca
A teeny, tiny
Big Bang in
Geneva
T
he world did not, despite dire warn-
ings, turn inside out and disappear
into a black hole on March 30. That
was the day when scientists at the
European Centre for Nuclear Re-
search cranked up the Large Hadron Collider
and sent two proton beams racing in opposite
directions at just under the speed of light
around the colliders 27-kilometre-long under-
ground tunnel. Record-shattering 7-TeV colli-
sions resulted, 10 million the first week that
the LHC was up and running at high power.
Each head-on collision of sub-atomic parti-
cles is a teeny tiny Big Bang, a look back to 13.7
billion years ago, to the origin of the universe.
By analysing data from the LHC, physicists
will come closer to understanding the very
geometry of spacetime. Theyll get to look at
the building blocks, the elementary particles,
quarks and leptons and bosons, that have zero
dimensions and take up no space, but may
somehow be made up of something still small-
er. Maybe theyll even produce the elusive
Higgs boson, the so-called God particle which
is thought to give all other matter its mass, al-
lowing gravity to hold things together.
This wasnt supposed to happen. Respected
physicists had speculated that these attempts
to get up close and personal with the Higgs
boson were being sabotaged by scientists from
the future. Theyd caused helium leaks and cuts
to funding. Theyd even sent a bird back in time
to drop a piece of baguette on a part of the
outside electrical apparatus, causing the gigan-
tic supercooled magnets to overheat.
Isnt science wonderful? I
think so. I am conducting
my own experiments, as I
do every year when the
weather gets warm
Isnt science wonderful? I think so. I am con-
ducting my own experiments, as I do every
year when the weather gets warm, into the
thermodynamics of phase transitions, using
a Scraped-surface Heat Exchanger. Scientists
dont know what to call what I create is it a
colloid, an emulsion, a foam? I have two SHEs
ice-cream makers and either one sufficie
ntly counteracts the entropy-inducing Second
Law of Thermodynamics to force composites
of fat particles and air bubbles suspended in
a viscous solution of sugars, lipids and prote
ins, to solidify. Milk, sugar, and some kind of
flavouring simple ingredients made sub-
lime. Smaller ice crystals are better, and prop-
er development of air cell structure is impor-
tant. The equilibrium is unstable at best, pass-
ing from solid to liquid again. Mango ice
cream melting on the tongue Yummmm. On
a hot day, this particular exchange of energy
has to be one of the singular delights of ther-
modynamic asymmetry. Ill be working on the
recipe all summer, trying to get it just right.
Hardly anything compares to ice cream, but
sometimes when Im reading, I come across a
perfect crystalline sentence that induces a
phase transition in me. Smashing the sen-
tence into smithereens and examining the
individual components, words, letters, doesnt
help to isolate that elusive Higgs boson of po-
etry, that gives perfectly simple combinations
of words the power to move us. Here is one
from Sappho that has exerted this force since
the 7th century BC:
The moon has set, and the Pleiads;/ it is the
middle of the night and time passes,/time pass-
es, and I lie alone.
Every time I read this, I melt.
the sake of family, while only 45 per cent
women felt confident enough to make the same
assertion. Could that be because desi girls are
taught to compromise early in life?
Is it this skewed version of a womans
world to blame for passing on our gender
biases to our daughters? Does it then really
matter whether you raise your daughters in
Andhra or America? In the end, no quota in
Indias political arena or the brazen take-on-
the-world philosophy in America will turn
the tide. The war must be waged and won in
our own minds and hearts.
Senior techies who moved to America in the
80s with pre-teen kids tell me that as an In-
dian upbringing on Indian soil they had fewer
gender issues to deal with. But try that today
with American born desi girls and the sce-
nario changes. Techie mums believe this is
because, in America, girls are not viewed as
a secondary sex to be seen and not heard.
Chromosome make up does not decide how
far one goes in life. On that note, to desi moth-
ers in the Valley and back home, I say in the
words of former U S Secretary of State, Mad-
eleine K Albright: There is a special place in
hell for women who do not help other women.
Let us raise those daughters strong.