Filter Criteria

It would be funny if were not so sad that a skin-tone filter exists on online matrimony site. It brought to mind the many Indian weddings I have attended in my life and how in the overwhelming majority of them the color of the bride's skin was a metric of great consequence. Lighter the better. Families score points by the number of light-skinned relatives they possess. They carry themselves with an air of superiority. I recall the rather cruel remarks made about my paternal aunts by extended family on account of their dark skin. It is as if their whole person-hood was subsumed by color. It did not matter that every one of them was well educated and had musical talents, it did not matter that they raised good kids or were good wives. They failed the first test by being dark-skinned. 

When I came of age, it was my turn to be ranked and compared by color of skin, to other females of my generation in the family. I fell somewhere in the middle - the place of irremediable mediocrity. One of my favorite cousins was at the dark end of the spectrum. She was very fashionable and knew to work with colors and textures that made her look wonderful. Her make-up highlighted her sharp features and she made made a statement in her hand-loom sarees and kurtis. R had turned the tables on the system and I was a big fan. But not everyone has the inner confidence that R did. The color of her skin seemed to have spurred her to force people to look at everything else about her. When R showed up at a family wedding, she aimed to stun and she succeeded. She made the light-skinned girls, raised to believe they were beautiful feel completely inadequate. Us folks in the middle were rooting for R. She gave us confidence to be much more than a filter-criteria.