To be wheatish or not to be wheatish?

To be wheatish or not to be wheatish is the question, as though I have the option to choose. The disturbing facts about the color of my skin started propping up when I started groom-hunting. When I put up my most eligible bachelorette profile online, we had a discussion about what the color of my skin should be on my profile. Is it wheatish or is it fair? My uncle and my mom took a good look at me, and went with fair. When I protested, my mom said, ‘People who are wheatish are putting fair, so why not you? You are fairer than wheatish so you are fair’. I had to agree, after all who doesn't like an elevated status?

I was having a casual chit chat with my grandmother from my paternal side, about a guy’s proposal, I looked at online and my family of three almost liked him.

My grandmother asked me, ‘How does he look like?’

I replied in a casual tone, ‘He looks okay’

‘What about his color?’

‘He is a bit dark’

‘Well take care then.’

‘Oh come on!’

‘You are at least of this color because of your mother. You have to be thankful for that.’

There goes another treasured family secret about me revealed to me.

I have had aunts’ at family functions, who proudly boasted, how they could change the color of their daughters’ skin. ‘Give me a few months. She will be as fair as a coconut.’

During my PhD days in Chicago, my friend and I discussed about what would be a lucrative entrepreneurship in India. It was summer time, the sun was blazing hot, determined to make our wheatish skins even darker. We had to apply a load of sunscreen with the highest SPF to protect the valuable color of our skin, after all our future depended on it.

We saw an American woman in shorts, with tanned skin passing by us. I told my friend, ‘You know what, just as these people have their tanning equipment we should have whitening equipment in India, that would be a great business.’

 She replied, ‘Yes that is so true.’

We don’t have equipment that makes our skin fair yet, but we do have a ton of whitening creams in market, which promise to improve our color. By the way, I am also surprised at how Shahrukh Khan has become fair over the years and even started giving fairness cream ads. Those creams should really work!

(Top) Shahrukh Khan in 1989, (Bottom) Shahrukh Khan in 2009

Unfortunately, Miss America 2013, Nina Davuluri, did not take this important factor of being fair, seriously. You see, she did not have these Indian Aunts and grandmothers hovering around her and reminding her of color and how her color could relate to her marriage prospects and even job prospects. If they did, she would have become fair like Shahrukh Khan, become one among the Americans and would not have to face the racist comments of being an Arab. Poor Nina, all her achievements downgraded because of her color. What a shame!

                 Dark beauties, (L to R) Rekha, Naomi Campbell, Bipasha Basu, Nina Davuluri

 I love women who are dark, like Naomi Campbell, Rekha (in the 70’s & 80’s), Bipasha Basu and Nandita Das. If a woman is fair all you look at, is her color. If a woman is dark, then you notice her features, how beautiful her eyes are, how full her lips are and how toned her face is. I am always attracted to the features than just the superficial color and of course, it is always the inner beauty that matters.

                  Dark is beautiful, a campaign which celebrates beauty and diversity of all skin tones. 

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All images from google images

Europe trip 2013 - London, London, London

My hubby and I celebrated our first anniversary by travelling to London. Well, that is not one of the most desired ways to spend an anniversary but we had no other option. We met our tour manager, from Cox and Kings at Dubai Airport. There were 35 people in our group. I was surprised by the cosmopolitan nature at the airport. Most of the women were clad in burqas and long skirts, but they looked fashionable. In Dubai, scarves, blouses and skirts with animal prints were in fashion.

Did you know that these days sparrows migrate by flying first class? In Bangalore Airport, the sparrows were having breakfast at the restaurant.

 I was so glad to see Starbucks at Dubai Airport. The last time I saw it was in Chicago, in May 2012

Camel is the rock star animal of Dubai

We reached London in the evening and retired to our hotel. The next day we started at eight in the morning in our bus. We met our tour guide, John. He gave us the city tour. He was a young guy with a clean shaved head. John was witty and gave all the juicy information about London. The Harrods department store once sold exotic animals as pets. Christian the Lion in the famous you tube clip lived in the store as a cub. At Buckingham palace, he told us how the Queen Victoria’s nose fell off from the statue last year and they had to fix it. He showed us a street near Hyde Park where a single parking spot costs 300000 pounds and the Pet Cemetery of Hyde park, where all the super-rich dogs of the royalty rest in peace.

                                      Queen Victoria's memorial in front of Buckingham Palace

Pet Cemetery at Hyde Park (Image from http://londoninsight.wordpress.com/2010/10/06/pet-cemetery-hyde-park)

We had a quick photo stop at Trafalgar square. At the center of the square is the Nelson's column. John told us, ‘The pigeons are banned from this square to preserve the beauty of the square’.
One of the fellow tourists was quick enough to respond, ‘Do the pigeons listen to you?’
John replied, ‘You see the white vans in the center of the square? They have hawks in the van. They release them from time to time to keep the pigeons away’.
Londoners love Lord Nelson, the question is do we love our politician’s enough? Our Indian pigeons express both love and hatred towards our country’s politicians every day. They perch on the statues, and they shit. The pigeons’ nasty acts are camouflaged by coloring our politician’s statues in white. We do have our own ways for protecting our squares. I realized that pigeons are an issue of National Security not only in London but also in many cities of India.

Nelson's Column at Trafalgar Square

                                                             
              The mermaid in the Jellycoe fountain and the lion in the background, Trafalgar square

I love the creative names of pubs in London; Fox & Hounds, Bunch of Grapes, Halfway to Heaven, The Shipwright Arms, and The Barrowboy & Banker. The pubs were the houses of rumination for great writers like Charles Dickens. These were few of the pubs we saw from the bus in our city tour. Ideal way to explore these pubs would be to go on pub crawling, feast on fish and chips and douse in beer. In this non-ideal world, we were not so lucky to explore the ideal way.

                     Beer window shopping in The Shipwright Arms and The Barrowboy and Banker

We also went for a ride on the London Eye, which is located on the south bank of River Thames. The giant Ferris wheel with futuristic white capsules rotates at a speed of 0.9 km/h and provides picturesque views of the city. The 30 minute ride was a bit boring for me. May be the silver surfer in the movie, Fantastic Four also went on a ride and could not bear it so tried to bring down the London Eye. Reality does breed fiction!

                                                                          The London Eye

                                       View of River Thames and the city from London Eye

The day ended with shopping a fridge magnet in Regent Street.The next day we traveled to Paris on a Ferry.

                                                                       To be continued...

In case you missed the story of Christian, the Lion

The spy who lost her head

'It is not your wrong - you are not having children with me so I am seeing other man to find outlet and he is saying to kiss your pumpkin' 

If you are wondering what kind of English that is. Well, it is Queen's English. This is how SS Gulabi, the pink rose, speaks all through the novel, 'The Spy who lost her head', written by Jane De Suza. 

Gulabi comes to Mumbai in search of her Bemba (BE + MBA graduate). Her father who has many cows and sheep in the village gives her six months time to find her own Bemba. After six months Gulabi will be offered to the groom of her father's choice along with cows and sheep. Gulabi lands in Mumbai with her seven suitcases in hot pursuit of her Bemba. As a lucky co-incident her landlord happens to be her Bemba but he does not reciprocate the same feelings for Gulabi. Unfortunately Gulabi also gets tangled in a mess in which she finds herself with the head of a man she does not know.She transforms from mere Gulabi to the spy SS Gulabi and investigates the case of the decapitated head. She happens to lose her much endeared head a couple of times, hence the name the spy who lost her head. The rest of the novel is about how Gulabi tries to convince the landlord Bemba to marry her and how she cracks the case of the head.

The plot is simple, but the character of Gulabi is hilarious. Her Queen’s English, her village attitude and dressing, her pious/religious opinions, her love for Bemba and her interactions with disinterested Bemba made me roll with laughter. I was reading the book in train and I laughed so hard that my husband said, ‘Can you read it some other time. Everybody is looking’. Well, I couldn’t do that. I would recommend this book for light reading. The book costs only Rs. 143. Pure entertainment for 143 bucks, not even movies are that cheap in Bangalore these days. The book totally worth reading.  

The Brigade that prevents Sexual Violence

I took self-defense classes for three semesters during my Ph.D., in Chicago. The instructor was a middle-aged person with salt and pepper hair and a good build. Every semester, he used to teach us one technique in self-defense and we used to practice it on him. Yes, on him. He got punched and kicked around mercilessly by about 10-12 women, so that we could get trained to use the self defense techniques. We also had discussions on common scenarios of violence against women, rapes, domestic violence and mugging and what we can do if we were in such situations.

The class used to sit around him in a circle and the discussion started something like this

‘Two women were attacked by a baseball bat and mugged in one of the Chicago’s neighborhoods. The women were going towards their car after staying in the bar until 3 AM. Both of them could be drunk. A man approached them with a baseball bat and started attacking them. He hit one lady first. The other woman wanted to save her friend so she tried to stop the attacker. In that process both of them were injured. Did you read that in the news?’

‘Yes’

‘What could the women have done to avert the attack?’

All of us were silent.

‘Well, what is unusual here? A man with a baseball bat approaching towards them at 3 AM in the morning. Does it seem natural?’

‘No’

‘They could be more aware of their surroundings. They could have got into their car faster. What did the second lady do when he was attacking the first lady?’

‘She tried to help her friend by going on to the attacker’

‘Did that help them to get out of the situation?’

‘No.’

‘The other lady could have escaped when the man was concentrating on her friend and called the police. That would have helped. Now, both of them are in a dangerous situation without help’

We also used to discuss about what we can do if we were about to be raped.

‘What if you are in a  situation where a guy wants to rape you and you are all alone?’

‘We can hit him with our elbow and use the technique.’

One of the girls asked, ‘What if he has a gun?’

‘Stay calm and oblige him until he keeps his gun aside. He cannot rape with a gun in his hand so he will keep it aside. That is your chance to escape’

I asked, ‘What if he has a partner to help?’

The instructor was a bit surprised. He replied, ‘No man will go to another guy and say, “Hey dude, I want to rape that woman. Can you help me?”, of course it hurts his ego. Even if there is a situation like that, you can use the technique on one person at a time.'

In our country, men with anti-social/misogynistic attitudes are shameless enough to take the help of their friends to rape other women and share the sadistic pleasure and the guilt. Averting one persons’ rape attempt is much easier than facing a gang of rapists. The mob psychology is also very complex. Each person can display his demonic side since the repercussions will be shared and he will not be the sole person who is accountable for the crime.

Attackers always choose a weak victim. One woman is an easy target but a group of women are an intimidating and powerful force. Red Brigade is a woman support group from Lucknow, formed by the victims of sexual abuse. The group fights with anybody who misbehaves with a girl/woman in public and prevent sexual violence. They are also trained in martial arts and they conduct self defense workshops and street plays which highlight women specific issues. They are dressed in red and black .The red signifies danger and struggle whereas the black denotes protest. Red Brigade was awarded the 2013 Godfrey Philips National Bravery Award and was nominated for the 2013 HT Women Award. If we have such brigades in every city & every neighborhood, may be that will bring down the gang rapes.

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Images from google images

More information about Red Brigade can be found at http://red-brigades.blogspot.in/2013/02/one-billion-rising-in-lucknow-with.html

Miss Preregrine's Home for Peculiar Children

                                              A novel by Ransom Riggs. On cover, the flying girl 

What if we were given an opportunity to relive one day of our life over and over, which day would it be? For me, it would be my graduation day. The day I finally saw the train…oops…light at the end of the tunnel. On my graduation day, I wore a red gown and took the doctorate certificate from my advisor on a stage decorated with multi-colored flags representing different colleges of the University. I can relive that day once or twice but reliving that day forever would have been boring.

In the book Miss. Preregrine’s home for peculiar children, the peculiar children relive the last day of their lives for several years in a parallel universe. This book is a debut novel by Ransom Riggs. The protagonist, Jacob is a rich kid who is bored of his parents’ wealth. He loves his grandfather and the stories he told when Jacob was a child. The stories were regarding his grandfather’s peculiar friends during his stay in the orphanage under Miss. Preregrine’s care. His friends had super powers; a girl who can create flame with her bare hands, another girl who can fly an invisible man and many more interesting characters (kind of like X-men). 

The girl who can create flames in her hands

Jacob always thought that these stories came out of his grandfather’s imagination, until his grandfather was murdered in the woods, close to his home. The last words of his grandfather are, ‘They are coming. You are not safe here’. At the murder site, Jacob finds a weird creature in the woods. 

                                                            The creature in the woods

After that fateful night of his grandfather's murder, Jacob has nightmares everyday with the creature in it. His parents take Jacob to a psychiatrist. As a cure for his bad dreams, the psychiatrist advises Jacob to go to his grandfather’s orphanage, to dispel the myths of his grandfather’s alternate world. Jacob goes to Cairnholm, UK to demystify his grandfather’s tales. The rest of the novel is about how he discovers these peculiar children and how he helps them to escape their enemy.

What I loved in this book were the pictures of the peculiar children.

                                      

                                            Can you guess what is weird about this picture

I also loved Jacob’s character, his wit and the humour in looking at things from a different perspective. The suspense builds up until Jacob finds the peculiar children. I could not keep the book down until Jacob met the peculiar children. The novel went downhill after Jacob discovers the dark secret about his new friends’ sunny place. In the end, I felt that the author put a villain in the story because all stories should have a villain in the end, which the virtuous must defeat. The ending is written with a thought to continue the novel but I felt it to be abrupt & incomplete. I did not get closure. I wanted more. I would not recommend this book to anyone because it starts with a great momentum which fizzles out after three quarters of the novel.

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All images from google images