Marriages are made in heaven—no longer practiced. Today’s matrimonial ads make us believe that the sacred task of bringing bride and groom together is their social duty and they discharge it in most mundane way, i.e. charging rupees ten per word. Pages after pages are occupied in letting you know that fairest of the fair bride can be made available to you. They have also nearly exploded the hitherto believed myth,” that beauty lies in the eyes of beholder”. These ads seem to be proclaiming from rooftop,” come to us, each ad of ours promises you nothing but pretty, beautiful and fair bride”. I wonder the ones who are not so lucky as to be acknowledged in terms of superlatives, where and how they advertise.
Most of the ads carry a great lie with equally great impunity, that is, no bride is dark complexioned, all are fair. Reaffirming our faith–everything is fair in love and war and now also marriage. This in turn has threatened the parents of genuinely fair brides giving them sleepless nights. Indian ingenuity is unique; ads now carry the word GORI in all sincerity and connotations. With Gori girls ruling the hearts and hearths, it is bound to give fillip to beauty parlors flooding the market with a whole range of herbal, not so herbal and verbal onslaughts. Necessity is mother of invention. Bazaar is full of oils, creams, masks and what have you, guaranteeing (no warranty please) to make you so Gori that you become nearly, yes, nearly unrecognizable even to your most intimate friends. When they are told the ’secret’ of your swift conversion into a Gori in less than ten days they are all the more distressed and have little option but to rush to the nearest beauty parlor or a shop selling the magic potion.

On the contrary, groom may be as thin as matchstick or as grotesque as the one shown in ‘Before’ photograph of a weight loss center but he is always handsome in the wonderland of ads. Icing on the top is that he is dark and handsome too—a typical Mills &Boon material. Darker he is, more handsome and he-man he would be. I wonder why they don’t refer girls as dark and beautiful or dark and lovely.
Our efforts to be Gora/Gori could be traced back to the days of British rule in India. To look like ‘Masters’. To emulate master is a deep-rooted hidden desire. ‘Haves’ have always been the role model for ‘have-nots’. Politically speaking, we are against all forms of apartheid and can speak non- stop particularly if it is some public forum but back home ….. Well that is another story.
“Beauty is skin-deep”,” The heart should be beautiful”, etc., etc., are numerous proverbs being used and taught but all this is forgotten as soon as the boy comes of age. The parents as well as the guy want to marry only a look alike of latest masala film heroine. Actresses of so called off wave and art films are at disadvantageous position here too. They invoke sympathetic and not amorous looks. Needless to say that one cannot marry and live happily long on sympathy alone. In their bid to look and remain Gori, the not so Gori ones are employing every possible device. Cucumber, orange, lemon, papaya, tomato, potato are used more than consumed.
Cosmetic surgery is also making hay while the sun shines. Your nose can now be chiseled to give Cleopatra touch or the silicon implants can make you look like an abnormal daughter of Eve. Rakhi Sawant is correct in saying that what God does not give; doctor gives. Cosmetico can drill a dimple or two on your face and cut your chin to size. Can ask for a beauty spot of the size and specifications one so chooses. Color of your eyes and hair can be changed to ‘mera wala blue’. Saif Ali khan comes back to Priyanka Chopra only after she uses a particular brand of fairness cream, though when she was declared as Miss World, nobody must have put the condition that she has to be fair-skinned if wishes to appear for the contest.
Taking cue from the western preferences (as they require tanning to give that dusky or bronze look which is very down- market for our middle class mindset), off-late now the top-notch socialites or the models are singing praise for the dusky look but our very own middle class milieu is still in that age-old state of mind—ladki ke nain naksha to koi khaas nahi hain par rang bilkul saaf hai;bilkul maide ki tarah gori hai—this fixation is going to stay ,come what may .A middle class girl gets chosen as an air-hostess only when her grandfather fishes out the sure shot nuskha of becoming gori-chitti from his old chest and within no time she gets selected as an air hostess for a top shot airlines though in reality you wont find all that gori ones up in the sky in the prominent airlines—skimpy clothing of course is there !!!!
So we, still the same, enamoured by gori mems, expecting gori bahus…hope it gets belied soon!!!