Beauty

For two weeks, I’m traveling around India and Nepal with the girls from my Gabriel Project volunteer group. Our last day in the slums was Monday, and after teaching, we packed up the apartment and hopped on a plane to Kerala, which is India’s southernmost state. We had a busy day, and now we’re sprawled in front of the TV watching Bollywood music videos. Bollywood dance moves are dramatic, rhythmic, and expressive, so it’s really fun to watch. Beyond that, though, we are all entranced by the women who are featured as lead singers or backup dancers. They all have plenty of curves to shake and jiggle, which just isn’t seen on western TV.

I have mixed feelings on standards of beauty here. I absolutely didn’t anticipate it, but being in India has been a refreshing break from the skeletal western ad campaigns I’m so used to at home. I distinctly remember driving by a billboard advertisement for a Bollywood movie, and registering that the actress in the picture was curvy, with a little bit of belly exposed above the waist of her skirt. It struck me as so dramatically different from the airbrushed twig women decorating our highways. I mentioned it aloud, starting my sentence, “You guys probably didn’t notice…” I was wrong; everyone had noticed.

While perhaps there isn’t an obsessive focus on body fat here, there is much attention paid to skin tone. My friend Adina went to a salon, where a woman told her she ought to get exfoliated to remove her ugly tan. Yeah, right.

Even for a white person, I’m pretty white, and plus I wear SPF 85 sunscreen every day. (No surprise that I’ve never been told to exfoliate.) So for the first time in my life, my light skin is causing me to embody a cultural beauty ideal. On top of that, the clothing we wear here is loose and flowy, so I’m less aware of my body that I would be at home. Overall, my body image has probably never been better, and I haven’t even exercised in like six weeks.

I shouldn’t feel any more or less pretty based on who is dancing on TV. I suppose I'm no more or less immune to such things in India than in the US, so it is nice to really understand that beauty public policy is not as objective as American culture would have me think.