A few fair questions

First Unilever announced that it will remove the word “fair” from its Fair & Lovely products. Now L’Oréal says it will also remove words such as “whitening” from its skin products. All this in response to the Black Lives Matter movement.

We have a few questions.

• What is the point of dropping the so-called offensive words if the product continues to sell?
• If the products continue, will the campaigns look any different?
• At what point did this nonsense about fairness enter Indian culture? Indians in the past were far more cool in their attitude to skin colour.
• And despite Shah Rukh Khan endorsing a fairness product, why is it that Indian women are obliged to be fair when men can be as dark as they please, more or less? Tall, dark and handsome – TDH. How unfair.

A toxic blend of caste, colonialism and gender has led to the Indian obsession with “fairness”. Let’s go colour-blind for some time!