An interesting alternative perspective for those who are going ga ga over a desi woman being the first of her kind winning Miss America. Would most of you really want someone like her to win Miss India? From the article - "What’s interesting is Miss America Nina Davuluri would never win pageants in South Asia because she’d be too dark to be considered beautiful & the same is true for all of those “Miss Indian American USA” pseudo-pageants held here, as well. No darkies allowed in winner’s circle. That gorgeous chocolate may play as exotic in the West, but in India, we prefer our beauty queens strictly vanilla — preferably accessorised with blue contact lenses. In a behind the scenes account of the Miss India training for contestants, Susan Runkle observed: I sat in on weekly individual sessions that dermatologist Dr. Jamuna Pai held with the contestants in order to examine their skin. Every single one of the young women was taking some sort of medication to alter her skin, particularly in colour, in the training programme in 2003. In a disturbingly casual manner, Dr. Pai emphasized the need for all the contestants to bleach their skin by prescribing the peeling agent Retin-A as well as glycolic acid and, in the case of isolated dark patches, a laser treatment. When I asked Dr. Pai, who trained as a plastic surgeon in London, why fair skin was such a concern at the pageant, she offered the following explanation. “Fair skin is really an obsession with us, it’s a fixation. Even with the fairest of the fair, they feel they want to be fairer. It isn’t important anymore, because the international winners are getting darker and darker.You wouldn’t notice our obsession, because you have such beautiful white skin, but I feel it’s ingrained in us. When an Indian man looks for a bride, he wants one who is tall, fair and slim, and fairer people always get jobs first. Today, this is being disproved because of the success internationally of dark-skinned models, but we still lighten their skin here because it gives the girls extra confidence when they go abroad.” Read more at: firstpost/living/miss-america-nina-davuluri-too-indian-to-ever-be-miss-india-1111477.html?utm_source=ref_article
Posted on: Mon, 16 Sep 2013 14:23:18 +0000
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