I am from Bangladesh, and in my country there’s a very
strange thing with young girls. They all want to be fairer and fairer. We, as a
Dravidian race, have a brownish complexion. Most of us have lanky features,
with black eyes and hair. But our girls constantly want to get rid of this dark
complexion. To them, the concept of beauty lies chiefly in being fair-skinned.
But they aren’t to be solely blamed as well. Boys generally
prefer fair girls for marriage. A dark-complexioned girl is fared poorly in the
matrimonial negotiations, no matter how otherwise qualified that girl could be.
This singular fact, coupled with aggressive marketing policy of Lever Brothers
that market Fair and Lovely, encourages the beautiful brown girls to go for
this ointment. Fair and Lovely has a tremendous business back here, and girls
are unnecessarily becoming whiter and whiter, sacrificing their natural brownish
complexion.
Are they really getting more beautiful using this cream?
Nobody cares. Girls want to be fair looking, and boys don’t want to accompany a
girl who is not fair enough. That’s the deal here. Often, before my very eyes, I’ve
seen very attractive dim complexioned girls turning into white witches, with
their face unnaturally white and in odd combination with the color of their
body. It seems as if they had painted their faces with limestone.
Changing colors is a characteristic of a chameleon; it can’t
be a trait of a dignified human being. What these girls are doing is that they
are degrading their position, eroding their personalities and turning
themselves as clowns under the pressure of the society they live in. Sometimes, if
I think about them, I feel really sorry. I imagine how I would feel if I had to
rub cream on my skin vehemently everyday in order to be acceptable to others! I
would just shut myself in a dark room (not lighted!) in insult and degradation.
So the poster/ postcard mocks this fact and ironically tries to mention what happens when things go against their natural appearances.
