Whiter Shade of Pale

It’s been worrying me for ages, and now I realise I’m not the only one. If you walk into any chemist’s shop, or the ‘bathroom’ section of any supermarket, you’re assailed by “whitening” products: whitening moisturisers, whitening face wash, whitening everything.

And they’re obviously big news: every other billboard at the moment features Bollywood beefcake John Abraham showing us how he’s got “two shades fairer” thanks to the lovely people at Garnier. Meanwhile a recent tv advert had some other model’s face breaking up into quarter-inch squares, with those ghastly brown bits literally falling away to reveal the inner paler person within.

Now I know this is complex: there’s centuries of ethnic, caste and class history at play here, and I don’t understand the half of it: other people can write about that far better than me. But it’s still a tragic situation if India’s young, impressionable busy girls buying beauty are being led to think that happiness lies in a creating a pale imitation of themselves.

Is this really what you drove out the British for?

We might be crap at football, but our kids are weirder than yours

I came into work slightly pale this morning, after several hours of purest agony yesterday. Nasty bout of Delhi belly? Attacked by a rabid dog? Unfortunate incident with an auto rickshaw? No, just several hours watching the Ashes. God I hate being English sometimes.

Happily, there was light relief every few minutes, as Indian TV got to try and sell us some overpriced crap. Occasionally they’d switch from selling other people’s crap to selling their own, in the form of the upcoming season of unmissable sporting treats, all washed down with a generous serving of ludicrous hyperbole.

Cue Hollywood trailer voiceover accent:
“Legends Will Collide!” in some cricket matches
“The Greatest Do Battle!” in the English Premier League
“High Octane Something Or Other!” in Formula One
and
“Who Will Emerge Victorious?” in the Indian kids’ spelling competition.

What? Kids’ Spelling? This is a sporting highlight of the summer? But I suppose they want something home-grown, and it’s monsoon season so it can’t be anything outdoors, and they lost out on the TV rights for International Scrabble Masters, Legends Pictionary and the World Cup of Times Tables.

Hard Rain

Not to put too fine a point on it, it’s been pissing it down all day. One of the side effects of the monsoon, that I hadn’t considered hitherto, is that a lot more people get in their cars. Add ‘a lot more people’ to the squillions already driving in this ridiculous city and you get what I just had: a six-mile journey that takes two hours. Suddenly, the thought of working 8 till 4.30, and trying to beat the traffic, doesn’t bring me out in quite so much of a cold sweat.

But still there are sights to warm the cockles, including couples clinging to each other on the lovers walk of the Marine Drive shoreline, soaked to the bones as the French say. And they don’t even have the usually stunning view of the Queen’s necklace to spark their romances: you couldn’t see more than about 100 feet. They must be in love.