Unlovely campaigns by cosmetic companies are damaging health

The ET Magazine recently carried a feature on the fairness industry. Playing on the prejudice that fair is lovely, the cosmetics industry has been spreading a dread of the sun while peddling lotions and creams that would lighten skin-tone and other lotions and creams that would repair the damage done by artificial lightening.

It now turns out that wide, white swathes of the population in India suffer from an acute shortage of Vitamin D, whose deficiency prevents the body from absorbing calcium. Now, did the three witches of Macbeth quite foresee this when they cried Fair is Foul? Unlikely they had White Leghorns in mind, for sure.

Quite apart from the abnormal monsoon, which has made aPeeping Tom out of the sun in most parts of India, lifestyle also conspires to keep the sun increasingly out of our proximate life. Work-life begins, with the morning commute, before the sun warms up to its job, and ends after dusk.

Artificial lighting shines your path from work to the life afterwards, which you struggle to keep alive, to report a decent work-life balance. The net result is an unlovely pallor on young India’s face.

Perhaps, it is time Indians rediscovered sun worship, an ancient tradition overturned by an induced craze to be the fairest of them all. Calcium in the bone, the white you do not see, or visibly fair, that is the question.