Without getting into too much detail – I’ll leave that for the academics slaving away in universities – I had a look at the perception of white/light skin in India, and how I feel about it. In short, white skin is beautiful, and foreigners who have it are rich and debauched. That’s the general consensus over here, but my own self-image?

I am very light-skinned. Pasty, even. My body is covered in spots of pigment, called moles, which prevent me from spending long amounts of time in the sun, and thus I cannot get a natural suntan. If I were so inclined, I could slather my skin with tanning creams on a daily basis and perhaps give off some orange illusion that I’m not almost translucent, but I’ve come to accept that this is just the way I am. My skin is not beautiful. There’s not much I can do about it, so I might as well learn to live with it.

Read more at The NRI…