Hema Gopinath Sah's Facebook post on Humans of Bombay has gone viral.
That skin colour is equated with beauty all over the world is obvious in the way companies still sell us fairness products and marriage ads still call for "slim and fair" brides. In India too, this obsession with fair skin runs deep. Perhaps that is why a post by the popular Facebook page Humans of Bombay has resonated with so many and gone viral on social media.
In the Facebook post, Hema Gopinath Sah, a Mumbai-based blogger and the author of the poem
Kali, talks about her own experience of growing up as a dark-skinned girl in a society obsessed with fairness.
"While growing up, I was made aware of my color through comments like, 'Work on your grades, if you can't be the beauty, you'll have to be the brains!'" says Ms Sah, whose beautiful poem
Kali - which literally means dark - went massively viral in April.
In the post, she talks about the discrimination that dark-skinned people face and the incident that led to her penning down
Kali"Maybe it's time to stop worrying about how fair we look, and start focusing on just 'being' fair to those around us...no matter what color their skin is," she concludes beautifully.
You can read her full post below:
Ms Sah's words have been shared over 3,000 times on Facebook, and collected hundreds of responses. Many have also detailed their own experiences with discrimination in the comments section of the post.
You can read her poem
Kali below:
This is not the first time that the topic of skin colour and body positivity has been discussed on social media. In April last year, Bollywood actor Abhay Deol had
slammed fairness creams advertisements. Just a few months after that, a powerful piece of spoken word poetry titled
"A Brown Girl's Guide To Beauty" had garnered much appreciation on social media.
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