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Dear Voice of Ram,
I recently watched your video with the title of “Let’s Un color”.This is not the first time when your page grabs my attention, you are my inspiration since when you started a campaign with the title of #ProfileForPeace back in 2016. It is the fact that both countries have ideological differences that separate our identity but our views on peace are always on the same page.
In your video, you address these words “Fair & Lovely you have to go” I had listened to your side of the story which inspired me to write down our side of the story to explain that how artificial beauty standards messing up with our inner and outer beauty.
I am a middle class Pakistani, being a girl with a fair complexion is always a must thing to have, “warna rishta kon dayga” since my childhood I was being told that “Fair is beautiful”. I remember how one of my relatives used to apply skin-whitening cream religiously on a one-year-old child just to meet the societal beauty standards.
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At the age of adolescence, I remembered how many of my friends discussed “totkay” and the famous formula skin-whitening cream that comes with the guarantee to become fairer in just one week in order to meet your “special one.” I remembered that not being “gora” shattered my confidence for many years and hampered my ways of adjusting myself in a society where “Dark is beautiful” is just a “Dewaany ka khauwab”
Source: Tumblr
So here is from my side,
To the commercials that are portraying a perception that your fair skin color earns you respect and then equalizes it with your dignified status in a society, to all those commercials, “You have to go”
To all those beauty totkas, creams, and injections that besides focusing on the detoxification of skin, psychologically destroy our mindset and create a perception that skin color sets the bar of success, to all of those pitiful standards of society, “You have to go”
To all those Aunties and Uncles who set the standards of the perfect rishta on the tone of ones skin color “Larki kali ha” “Larka sanwala ha” to their mindset and standards of beauty, “You have to go”
And… Finally, those people who set specific beauty standards for other people, to those mentally retarded people, “You need to grow up”
