The idea that your skin colour would imply anything more than just what it is absurd to designer Masaba Gupta. Having grown up a dark-skinned girl in a family where her grandfather was obsessed with fair skin had her confused as a child. “I would play about six to seven hours of tennis a day, in the sun. He would be palpitating, like ‘you’ve become black’.” Masaba laughs off the memory, ridicules it even, tanning being the most natural result of being in the sun. She recalls haldi and other home ‘remedies’ being rubbed on her to help “scrub off the colour”. “I’m like ‘that ain’t happening, you can’t scrub colour off’.”
Growing up, Masaba realised that skin colour wasn’t something to obsess over or attempt to correct, it’s just who you are. But as an adult, she still hears it being brought up every day, as do the rest of us. “I think we were talking about someone’s wedding the other day and they said, well… at least the girl is fair. What has that got to do with anything?” Masaba rightly points out, as if fairness was some attestation to one’s character. She adds, “The colour of your skin has to do with which side of the equator you live on and it doesn’t have to do with anything else.”
Finally! Masaba lays it out in black and white and any other shades out there.
The colour of your skin is only an indication of where you are from. Embrace it, accept it and work it.
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