Minority preference

The adjudication and enthronement of Indian (Andhra)-origin Nina Davuluri as Miss America 2013 is not only a triumph for this 23-year-old medical student, but also a well-deserved slap in the face of the brain-dead badshahs of Bollywood and beauty pageant organisers, who seem to be innocent of all notions of ethnic good looks. Although multi-ethnic America, hitherto a white racist — and in pockets still supremacist — nation has accepted that norms and standards of beauty need to be broadened, and several Afro-American women have been crowned Miss America, Bollywood moguls who define standards of beauty can’t seem to accept that forget black, brown is beautiful. The new Miss America’s coronation is also a triumph for the Stay Unfair, Stay Beautiful media campaign of the Chennai-based change.org/stay beautiful movement. Supported by actress Nandita Das, who has suffered colour prejudice in Bollywood, the campaign is protesting the promotion of skin lightening creams and lotions by Bollywood stars. Despite being blessed with striking ethnic pulchritude and thespian talent, Das is routinely rejected for lead roles by Punjabi and north Indian producers who dominate Bollywood. But this brainwashing of cinema and television big and small shots by the skin lightening creams and lotions manufacturing industry led by the London/Amsterdam-based Hindustan Unilever whose suggestively branded Fair and Lovely cream contributes an estimated 15 percent of the company’s annual revenue, is not confined to Bollywood. In the film industry of peninsular India, including Andhra Pradesh where  Davuluri’s parents were born and the general population is chocolate complexioned, its de rigueur for film stars — especially actresses — to be whiter than white and male actors are obliged to be painted tall, fair and handsome in sharp contrast to supporting actors. Yet despite the perverted efforts of skin cream manufacturers and Bollywood producers, your editor’s research on the subject indicates that the general population  appreciates, and is quite content with the nation’s millions of brown beauties. Only cinema producers and mothers-in-law aren’t.   Soured honeymoon No government — not even the Indira Gandhi-led Congress government of the infamous Emergency (1975-77) —  in the history of independent India has done as thorough a job of alienating the intelligentsia as the Congress-led UPA-II under Dr. Manmohan Singh. Ironically, the surprise appointment of this scholar-economist, widely (but erroneously) credited with having masterminded the resurrection of the Indian economy with partial liberalisation and deregulation in 1991, as prime minister of the Congress-led UPA-I government in 2004, was welcomed by the intelligentsia which believed he would complete the overhaul of the Indian economy. In its second term when a rash of scandals — 2G telecom spectrum, iron ore mining, coal blocks allocations, Adarsh housing, and Robert Vadra-DLF to name some — shocked the public even as Parliament descended into chaos, gender crimes and communal conflagrations rocked the republic, Anna Hazare’s anti-corruption movement was scuttled by an all-party conspiracy, and prices went through the roof, the intelligentsia has lost all respect for the government and the Congress party. A case in point is…