Friday, November 21, 2008

Fairness - boon or bane

Natural Selection : The famous term coined by Charles Darwin. Natural selection is the process by which favorable heritable traits become more common in successive generations of a population and unfavorable heritable traits become less common.
How is that related to fairness: When a couple, with one dark-skinned and one light-skinned partner, have a child, the child will usually inherit the dark skin. This is simply because nature makes the better choice. Yes, thats correct dark!! Fair skin has a lot more problems as compared to dark skin. Fair skinned people are more likely to have skin diseases due to the derth of pigment melanin. So obvioulsy unbaised nature makes the better choice.
Now for some facts that wiki has for fairness creams: Asia has the biggest market for fairness creams. Basically they are obsessed with white. Asian men no longer believe that fairness is only for women. Indian men, as well as their counterparts in other Asian countries, including Korea and Japan are turning to fairness cream. According to trade analysts, men’s fairness products is valued at Rs 30 million, and constitutes 35 percent of the market.
Initially the reason for dark or fair skin was related to kind of work people did, manual hard labour done by workers in fields versus indoor jobs done by more educated people, which soon led to caste distinction and later on to color distinction. Though India has come out of the caste distinction, its still stuck on color and the growing sale of fairness creams only helps to reinstate the belief.
Cmon, again which generation is it? We are not health consious as much as fairness concious. We do not live in a Utopian society where choices were made by the way things appear or look. We live in a modern world with a Utopian attitude. Thats was 16th century. We say Nature is the best teacher. So why not learn something from it?

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