I’m Kishore bhardwaj and I’m the last
scheduled TEDx speaker for tonight so
before I get started with my talk I just
like to congratulate all my fellow
speakers on phenomenal talks and as well
thank that TEDx team for helping put
together this wonderful performance and
help us with preparing her talk so could
so with that I’d like to get started if
you were to go to any drug store in
America you’re bound to find products
that will help you get 10 there are
bronzers tanning lotions and even
melanin boosting serums and all sorts of
crazy stuff but instead let’s take a
little bit of a trip about halfway
across the world to a land where over
time various races and ethnicities have
ethnically bonded or amalgamated to
create a naturally tan population and
with that namaste and welcome to India
this enchanting land of over 1 billion
people is also home to 22 major world
languages as well as many different
ethnicities and cultures and throughout
history different world powers of
conquered different parts of the
peninsula over time for instance the
Mughal Empire in the north constructed
world wonders that the world knows such
as the Taj Mahal and the Kutub Minar and
the Dravidians in the South who are the
native people to the South constructed
beautiful Indian temples as this
hundreds of them the one pictured here
is called Mahabalipuram it’s a religious
site and the Portuguese and British
conquerors also left behind their
cultures and religion and although each
state has its own different cuisines
cultures day to day customs and
languages there are also plenty of
unifying factors Indian patriotism and
national sports are two of the main glue
sticking the myriads of these micro
cultures together except it’s my painful
duty to inform you that there’s one
terrible cultural aspect tearing apart
the Indian people and that is their
obsession with light-skinned remember
the tanning lotion from the first slide
imagine the opposite of that but to an
extreme extent imagine your mother
scolding you for getting a Sports ten
genuinely worried that you will not be
able to get you married
imagine being rejected by a potential
spouse by the love of your life
the only reason being that you are too
dark
imagine being an overqualified candidate
for a job and your interview goes
flawlessly you nail it but you don’t get
called back why because the candidate
who walked in five minutes after you was
just a few shades lighter imagine you’re
the darkest sibling in your family and
you grow up knowing every single day of
your life that you’ll never be the
favorite child no matter how successful
accomplished or philanthropic you may be
imagine the culture around you forces
you to bleach your skin and dye your
hair just so you have a fair shot at
success now you all are imagining right
now but this nightmare this nightmare is
a reality for the beautiful but darker
boys girls women and men of the Indian
subcontinent if you don’t believe me and
there’s reason for you not to because
I’ve just given you hypotheticals
imagine this imagine that I want you to
pay attention to the screen in a few
minutes a few moments and watch a video
of world famous Bollywood actor and for
those of you who do not know what
Bollywood is it’s the Indian version of
Hollywood a video of Shahrukh Khan who’s
a critically acclaimed actor endorsing a
skin bleaching product and in this
advertisement he tells a darker man in
search for love in search for a soulmate
to bleach his skin in order for him not
to look like a lowly domestic to his
female counterparts and although this ad
is in Hindi which is the national
language of India
the degenerate and twisted logic that it
is based off of simply speaks for itself
please
[Music]
suppose morrow gay and havin territory
and someone mandoline a fair and
handsome friend scream more donkey
sucked to a chocolate risk of five
action fairness system they’d
long-lasting Dora but they are very
that’s not an anomaly there are plenty
of ads like that if I wanted to I could
fill up this whole TEDx talk with ads
similar to that one and worse than that
one well that’s for another time keep in
mind that Shahrukh Khan the actor that
you saw a role model for youth and young
men my role model as a child growing up
told the man in that video to bleach his
skin and endorse this terrible practice
of skin bleaching that’s pretty blunt
and blatantly color discriminatory or
the shorter-term colorist
but the bluntness does not stop there in
India where arranged marriage is still
fairly common prospective husbands and
wives give resumes and a list of
prerequisites for a potential spouse in
the matrimonial section of a newspaper
so similar to in the States we have the
sports section business session etc in
India they also have a matrimonial
section just for these ads so I’ve kind
of pulled together a few newspaper
clippings from different parts of India
and let’s just look at a few so this is
a matrimonial section from The Sunday
Times and next to words like likes
traveling and you know business major
and likes kids likes to cook is a word
that’s from I’ve taken newspapers from
all different parts of India and there’s
one word that’s in common between all of
them and I’m gonna ask the audience does
anybody want to guess what that word is
these newspaper clippings as I said are
from different parts of India and give a
diverse sample of how these matrimonial
sections are and this explicitly shows
how a parent this fairness epidemic has
become and unfortunately demanding fair
spouse’s has become the norm now let me
show you some statistics this graph is
from part matrimony calm in addition to
newspaper is in matrimonial sections
they’re also dating websites so in the
u.s. we have a harmony and match calm
but in India they have both matrimony
which is a dating site for arranged
marriages so I’d like you to take a look
at the South Indian graph right here and
with a little bit of addition you can
figure out that over fifty percent of
South Indians identify as fair or very
fair when South Indians are of the
Dravidian ethnicity the same ethnicity
that
built the temples that I showed you
earlier and Dravidians are naturally
dark and have curly hair and me being a
South Indian most South Indians do not
look like me they’re dark and have curly
hair resemble more African than white so
when pigs fly that statistic is real so
why is there such a stigma why are these
South Indians embellishing their actual
skin color acting like they’re lighter
and more Caucasian looking than they
actually are so I decided to research
this question why is there such a stigma
blame for colorism or color
discrimination in India is attributed to
different conquering powers in archaic
principles throughout history and also
immigrants immigrants are blamed for
everything these days
but Indo Orient’s who were immigrants
from North India who were lighter than
the native indigenous Indians there
could have been a conflict there the
Mughal Empire same people who built the
Taj Mahal hailed from the Caucasus so
there could have been some conflict and
color discrimination there the British
who were white there could have been
some discrimination there and these all
these different powers have received
their fair share no pun intended of
blame so I decided to research this
little bit further so the caste system
or the Varna system in Sanskrit has
always been blamed for discrimination in
India of all sorts and what the Varna
system or caste system basically is it’s
a system that attributes different jobs
to different people in a community or
originally based on merit but now it’s
based on hierarchy so if I’m of a
certain caste
my kids will be of a certain caste my
grandkids will be able to certain caste
etc and this system was separating
people into groups and the first
recorded incidents of this in Hindu
history was in the Rig Veda which was
discovered about 3,500 years ago written
3,500 years ago and it is a highly
revered Indian text and I looked through
the Rig Veda in my free time and look
chanced upon the poorest rakta which is
a verse that analogizes the caste system
of Varna system to an eternal being and
I’ve written it here the brahmanas were
as mouths the CRA’s were as arms the
vices worst eyes the shooters were his
feet and as you can see with this
pyramid here the Brahmins referred to
the members of the priests or academic
caste they were responsible for passing
on knowledge they held the power the
truth Ria’s were the Warriors the kings
and the legislative groups of India
the vices were the merchants or
landowners and the sudras
were the vocational caste of India and
made sure that garbage wasn’t rotting on
the streets as the civilization
progressed and this beautiful metaphor
explains that without all castes present
society would cease to function imagine
it an eternal being without a mouth or
without arms it’s very hard to imagine
and many professors from universities
have conjectured that the oral
recitation method used to convey the
Vedas and other important texts like
this from mouth to mouth have maybe led
to the misinterpretation of such
metaphors eventually evolving into caste
and color discrimination but I
personally don’t believe in this and
I’ll give some more evidence so throw it
Hindu history many dark and non Brahman
which are everyone above the priests
class figures have been extremely
revered and are venerated on a daily
basis so two examples are Lord Krishna
and Lord
both incarnations of our God and they’re
portrayed in blue in order to to
describe detail otherwise if they were
portrayed in black it would be very hard
to show the intricacy of their faces and
this even goes so far to say that
Krishna which is the figure on the right
even means black in Sanskrit and as for
women
the maiden Draupadi from the epic
Mahabharata which is one of our ancient
texts was very dark and was also very
beautiful
so if Hindu texts categorized people but
did not discriminate by any means then
when did this deviation from mutual
respect to loathing dark-skinned happen
turns out that the British were
notorious for imposing their archaic
Victorian ideals upon the Indian people
and constantly reminded their subjects
of the relative significance to their
European rulers and there’s one sign
outside of a European Club in India and
a European club is like a Country Club
in the states in India that the only
prerequisite to get in is that you have
to be white signs like this no dogs or
Indians allowed to make matters worse
there were black towns there were white
towns the British segregated townships
as they did in South Africa and many
other nations probably the worst crime
that they did to Indians amongst the
realm of colorism said they gave lighter
skin the Indians more power and chances
to succeed within the British government
and this led to a disparity but I
revolutionaries like Mahatma Gandhi
toiled day and night to remove caste
discrimination and allowed for an equal
playing field meaning that anybody from
any caste can pursue any profession that
they like but for some reason India
decided to do like a selective rebellion
and did not rebel against all archaic
and wrong principles but for some reason
decided to cling on to color
discrimination and colorism and let’s
see how this color of sentiment has
stayed within the Indian people years
after the British left
so this simple random sample is of men
and women who were asked if they had the
choice to go on a date with a date a
lighter skinned person or not and as you
can clearly see even taking margin of
error into consideration the numbers are
both above 50% showing how instinctively
Indian the majority of the Indian people
think in that having light skin and
being beautiful are synonymous here’s
another graph that shows the same random
sample from before was asked to define
the word beauty and the frequency shown
are the percentages of people who use
the word fair or light-skinned in their
definition and as you can see both men
and women are even taking margin of
error into consideration are both above
the 50% mark and keep in mind how males
are slightly more receptive to having a
light skinned woman then females are two
men just keep that in mind for now I’ll
get to that in this graph here and this
is a very sad and interesting graph um
the person surveying this random sample
marked each survey e on a scale of 1 to
5 in terms of how dark or how light they
were one being very dark five being very
light now they were also asked if Fair
is beautiful and the percentages shown
are the people who say yes and almost
disregarding your color over 50% in each
survey responded that Fair is beautiful
meaning that the people who were dark
skinned
sadly accepted the fact that Fair was
beautiful and could this insinuate that
dark is not beautiful to them possibly
and this is females who know what we’re
asked were they aware of the harms of
bleaching their skin and as you can see
84% are aware and 16% are unaware but
the majority of females did know the
harmful effects of using bleach to
artificially lighten their skin and skin
lightening is a very common practice in
India I showed you this ad I carried
this word no I don’t carry this wherever
I go um I brought this for this
obviously but
I got this from my local Indian grocery
store in the Greater Boston area showing
how it’s even spread around so if we
could just pass that around please
showing that this epidemic is real now
you’ve seen the data you I’ve showed you
some reasons behind colorism in some
examples through the matrimonial ads and
the color discrimination in Indian
culture through that advertisement but
now comes the question how do we fix
this if you’ve been toning out my whole
talk just listen to these few words
colorism is a prejudice and it is deeply
rooted deeply ingrained in the indian
culture it’s like a phyllo pastry has
mouths it’s a multi-layered problem it’s
a result of many other issues that I
didn’t even mention in this talk such as
the education disparity between the rich
and the poor the cultural competency
disparity between metropolitan cities
and backwards villages and even the
rigid roles men and women are supposed
to play in Indian society are all to
blame and I could even give another TED
talk just listing the factors that are
attributed to color discrimination in
India right now again colorism is a
prejudice the Indian people do not need
to learn cultural competency and accept
that fair does not necessarily insinuate
beautiful or that dark is beautiful
because as you can see with this
statistic over here um a lot of people
know what they’re doing is wrong that
bleaching their skin is wrong that
conforming to this white ideal is wrong
but for some reason still decide to do
it it’s an addiction so instead of
learning to accept the Indian people
need to unlearn the years of
institutionalized colorism and the
promotion of falsehood that they have
been under and as you can imagine
unlearning something is much harder than
learning something for instance
anybody who’s tried to quit a bad habit
smoking drinking drugs even biting nails
it’s so hard to stop this almost
instinctive task so we can solve this
but it’s like a tree it’s very deeply
rooted we have to get it it obliquely so
how can we help how can you help
there are many small solutions that need
to be coupled together in order to
defeat colors and color discrimination
and I’ve listed a few of the problems
just before and here I present to you my
small solution and it is one small
solution that needs to be kind of
marched together with plenty of other
solutions to defeat this monumental
problem so let me go back to arranged
marriages for a second
so traditionally in many other cultures
as well the woman does the domestic work
takes care of the kids cleans the house
cooks the food while the man makes the
money and this means that being
beautiful to men has become more
important and to maintain socioeconomic
status because the woman is completely
financially dependent on the man and
keep in mind how men were more receptive
to having light-skinned brides so this
puts a burden on the woman to become as
light-skinned as possible to conform to
beauty standards as much as they can so
how do I say we solve this issue empower
women short answer it make them
financially independent it has worked
beautifully in cities and more and more
women joined the indian workforce and
powers and numbers over 1 billion people
the workforce is growing day by day so
how can you help sitting at Deerfield
Academy we can donate or volunteer to
organizations such as care called vidi
ala and c1 which is the self employment
Women’s Association and these are all
organizations that toil day and night to
increase education in India increase
awareness in India and also provide
infrastructure for women to operate
businesses in India and what this will
do especially in the rural parts is help
women become financially independent and
by you know donating volunteering and
even perhaps even working at
organizations like these we can
hopefully one day make it such that an
Indian woman’s socioeconomic status has
no correlation at all to the color of
her skin and literally a call Videla can
support what one Indian child’s
education for literally a dollar a day
so next time you want to buy a coffee at
Cumberland Farms redirect that dollar to
a call vidi ala one more day of
education for a child one step closer to
defeating colorism
such a deeply rooted issue we should get
started out now before it gets worse so
now that you know how to solve it
slightly I’m gonna end this on a
personal note so I have a big family
and what big families comes a lot of
births and about two years ago my I
guess she’s the toddler now cousin Lila
was born about six months ago my baby
cousin Annika was born and look they’re
so cute Annika is on there on your left
and Lila’s on the right and about two
weeks ago my baby cousin Amara was born
so you know I have so many new cousins
now and Amara was named after my
great-grandmother who’s unfortunately no
longer with us today but she was loving
independent driven feisty and she was
also very dark and regardless of how
dark these babies these my beautiful
baby cousins turn out to be I want to
guarantee their fair shot at success and
to a certain extent make the color of
their skin irrelevant relative to their
siblings relative to the rest of the
people and hopefully one day my cousins
will not only be able to appreciate
their true skin color but the Greater
Indian population will be able to
realize that the in will be able to
realize that they should be able to see
through the insignificant pigment of the
membrane covering our bodies and instead
appreciate what truly is on the inside
and with that thank you for your time [Applause]