Promod Puri's Blog: Hinduism:beyond rituals,customs and traditions, page 99

Rakshabandan’ – the festival that celebrates the brother-sister bond

A sister tying the protective thread.

Vikram Verma, CC BY-ND

Mathew Schmalz, College of the Holy Cross

This year, Monday, August 7 marks one of the most important celebrations for Hindus throughout the world: Rakshabandhan, a ceremony honoring the bond between sisters and brothers. The date of Rakshabandan varies from year to year since Hindus follow a lunar calendar for religious celebrations.

During Rakshabandhan sisters tie a protective thread around the right wrist of their brothers. Brothers give gifts and promise protection to their sisters. The word “rakshabandhan” means “tie of protection.”

The festival affirms the crucial importance of family in the Hindu tradition. But many of my Hindu friends also are quick to add that the festival is also about Hinduism’s openness. For example, one of the most popular legends surrounding Rakshabandhan concerns the connection between a Hindu queen and a Muslim king.

Sisters not only tie their brothers as defined by blood relationship, but also those with whom they have a very close family-like relationship. In fact, as an American Catholic and a scholar of comparative religions, I myself have been “tied the thread” during Rakshabandhan.

Stories of the Rakhi

The “rakhi,” a thread or amulet, is an ancient means of protection in Hindu culture. One of the sacred Hindu books, the Bhavishya Purana, tells the story of Indra, who was fighting a losing battle against demons. When his wife, Indrani, tied a special thread to his wrist, he returned to battle and triumphed.

Today in North India, the most widely repeated legend related to Rakshbandhan concerns Rani Karnavati, a 16th-century queen of the city of Chittorgarh in the western Indian state of Rajasthan, and the Muslim Mughal Emperor Humayun.

The legend goes that Chittorgarh was threatened by a neighboring sultan and Rani Karnavati knew that her troops could not prevail. And so, she sent a rakhi to the even more powerful Mughal emperor. Humayun and Karnavati became brother and sister and he sent troops to defend her.

The historical veracity of this story remains a matter of debate among scholars. But it is still part of popular culture in India, despite the fact that Humayun’s troops did not arrive in time to prevent Karnavati and the rest of Chittorgarh’s female inhabitants from ritually burning themselves alive to avoid capture.

The festival is not limited to blood relationships.

Yash Gupta, CC BY-NC

Nonetheless, the festival of Rakshabandhan has been presented as an expression of solidarity between Hindus and Muslims who have a long and tortured history on the subcontinent. For example, India’s Nobel Laureate poet Rabindranath Tagore advocated that Hindus and Muslims tie a thread on each other during the festival. He also used the image of the rakhi in his poems, such as one where he describes the “shadows and lights” of the Earth as lying like “a rakhi-band on future’s hand.”

The ritual of Rakshabandhan

One of the crucial aspects of the celebration of Rakshabandhan is that it is not limited to the immediate family or to those who have a similar religious identity. Even an American Catholic like me can be honored in the festival.

When I first went to India 30 years ago, I lived with a Hindu family in the Hindu holy city of Varanasi. Very quickly, I became accepted as a real member of the family with attendant responsibilities. I was a brother to the three sons, Ajay, Sanjay, and Amit; and also to the two sisters, Hema and Suchita.

Different designs of rakhis.

Nidhi Srivastava, CC BY-NC-ND

Our family relationship has endured over 30 years. And when I am in India during Rakshabandhan, I am “tied” a rakhi by Hema and Suchita as I was all those years ago.

The ceremony would begin with both Suchita and Hema tying a rakhi to my right wrist. Both threads were quite colorful and inset with rhinestones. As they tied the rakhi, they repeated words and phrases in Sanskrit meant to protect me from harm and to reaffirm the brother/sister relationship.

First a red dot, called a “tilak,” was made on my forehead with a powder called “kumkum” and uncooked grains of rice. While the tilak has a number of meanings, Hema and Suchita told me it would “open” the hidden third eye of wisdom in my forehead.

Then I was honored by the clockwise rotation of an oil lamp. This rite of welcoming and honor is called “arati.”

The fire is considered a witness to the sacredness of the bond between brother and sister. I then presented my sisters gifts.

This basic pattern is also found in many forms of Hindu temple worship, called puja, which are, in part, hospitality rites that honor the presence of the deity.

Academic perspectives

Scholars often consider Rakshabandhan in studies of what it means to establish a relationship with someone. For example, they note that brothers are the “givers” in Rakshabandhan. This reverses the dynamic in traditional Indian society, where the woman herself is symbolically “gifted” to her husband during the wedding ceremony. From this anthropological perspective, relationships are established and maintained through establishing clear roles of “giver” and “receiver” as well as “protector” and “protected.”

But what Rakshabandhan also shows is that not all forms of “kinship” are based upon blood descent. And it is here that understandings of Rakshabandhan mirror the famous Hindu phrase: “The cosmos is a family.”

Mathew Schmalz, Associate Professor of Religion, College of the Holy Cross

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

‘COW ECONOMICS’ ARE KILLING INDIA’S WORKING CLASS

Afroz Alam, Maulana Azad National Urdu University

When Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressed the Indian parliament for the first time in June 2014, his inaugural speech focused on integrating and protecting India’s Muslims.

“Even the third generation of Muslim brothers, whom I have seen since my young days, are continuing with their cycle-repairing job,” he said, referring to one of the many menial jobs to which Indian Muslims are often relegated. “Why does such misfortune continue?”

But instead of “bring[ing] about change in their lives,” as Modi promised, his government has made life harder for India’s Muslims by cracking down on the leather and beef industries.

Impact on Muslim and Dalit livelihoods

Muslims and Dalits (the marginalised group once known as “untouchables” in the Hindu caste system) are among the poorest in India, and they have very little access to property. By tradition and due to a lack of other opportunities, many work in the leather sector, which employs 2.5 million people nationwide.

Over the past three years, this trade has increasingly made Muslims and Dalits the targets of so-called cow vigilantism – attacks perpetrated by Hindus on cow traders in the name of religion. And legislation adopted in May, which amends the 1960 Prevention of Cruelty on Animals Act, is set to victimise these populations economically.

Among other changes, the new rules mandate that cows, camels and buffalo may be sold to farmers only for agricultural purposes, not for slaughter.

In the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state, one out of every 1000 work in cow-related industries, including slaughterhouses and the leather industry. The town of Kanpur recently saw several slaughterhouses close down, putting out of work over “400,000 employees linked to leather industries”, according to a Reuters report.

The supply of local hides has declined precipitously, leading to a decrease in Indian sales of leather and leather products. From April 2016 to March 2017, total leather exports dropped 3.23% from the previous year, to US$5.67 billion from US$5.9 billion.

India also does enormous trade in meat. In 2015, the main market for its buffalo meat was Vietnam, which buys up US$1.97 million worth of it, followed by Malaysia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Iraq.

Last financial year, annual production was estimated at 6.3 million tonnes and exports totalled US$3.32 billion, according to a report in the Economic Times. That’s down from US$4.15 billion the year before. In Uttar Pradesh alone, attacks on cow related-businesses have already triggered losses of US$601 million on the state’s export business.

Coercive measures

States have also introduced several coercive measures aimed at people in the cow businesses. Uttar Pradesh, whose chief minister is a right-wing Hindu fundamentalist, leads the measures.

Illegal slaughterhouses have been at the core of the debate in recent months following a government crackdown in March 2017, as non-compliant facilities struggle to adapt to complex regulations, including locating shops at specific distances from religious places, getting appropriate documents from several administrations or particular freezers.

On June 6 2017, the state issued a new directive to punish cow slaughter and illegal transport of dairy animals under the National Security Act and Gangsters Act, effectively criminalising traders.

This has encouraged harassment of Muslims and Dalits in Uttar Pradesh. Even in the Muslim-majority village of Madora, residents are encouraged to denounce those who engage in slaughtering cows by the promise of a INR50,000 (US$1000) reward.

On the west coast state of Gujarat, cow slaughter is now a non-bailable offence, punishable with life imprisonment, meaning that people who kill a cow will serve the same time as a murderer.

Central Jharkhand and other states ruled by Modi’s BJP party have begun applying similar laws. The national government is also currently considering a petition to give cows an Indian identity card similar to those issued to its citizens.

The legal status of cow slaughter in India in 2012. Today, all yellow regions have turned red.

Barthateslisa/Wikimedia, CC BY-ND


In the name of the cow

These new rules have reinforced the impunity of criminal groups that burn down Muslim and Dalit businesses, terrorise cow traders and brutally beat or kill people. Rebranding themselves as animal activists, cow vigilantes exploit the sanctity of this animal in Hinduism to commit violence, with the tacit endorsement of state and national governments.

The violence has impacted both legal and illegal traders (bulls and buffalo are not included in new regulations), generating panic among flayers, contractors, truck drivers, traders, daily wage earners, who are now abandoning their posts out of fear. The majority are Dalit or Muslim.

Hindu slaughterhouse owners, on the other hand, have been largely spared by the wrath of cow vigilantes and onerous regulations. Of the country’s 11 largest meat-exporting companies, eight are Hindu-run.

Flourishing and paradoxical beef trade

None of this will help already-tense Hindu-Muslim relations in India, nor does it seem to bode well for Modi’s “Make in India” initiative to boost the country’s economic production.

According to the campaign website, the government hopes to increase leather exports to US$9 billion by 2020, from its present level of US$5.85 billion, and bring the domestic market to US$18 billion, doubling its current value.

‘Make in India’ may make some citizens very rich, but others, not so much.

To do so, the government says it will focus on maintaining India’s comparative advantages in production and labour costs and ensure the availability of skilled manpower for new or existing production units. But that may be hard when Muslim and Dalit workers are being systematically singled out and harassed.

Can Modi’s government really afford a crackdown on cow economics?

Afroz Alam, Associate Professor and Head, Department of Political Science, Maulana Azad National Urdu University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

BC Fires And The Sun

Source: BC Fires And The Sun

Past, Present And Future

By Promod Puri

“The past is history, future is mystery, but today is a gift……”, stay in the present and enjoy the moments. These are some of the many favored in-vogue quotes.

The popular quotations or advisories suggest our prospects belong to the moments we live in. We are told to live, feel, and enjoy the era of the present, rather than being prisoner of the past or future.

The reality is: our past is an assortment of both joyous, rough, memorable, and learning experiences. Whereas, our future lies in the prospect of imagination.

Imagination is an inspiring concept which is very natural foresight in the life of an individual as well as the society we belong to. Civilizations have been created, nourished, and developed on our ability to contemplate about the future.

No doubt, anxieties, worries or concerns often become parts of our contemplations, but so do the dreams. In this package, destiny is created thru our forward-looking karmas of the present which influence our future. Progress comes by prospecting at the future.

Flights to the future with optimistic imaginations are the thrills and promises of the prospective unknown.

Prospecting is natural. It is a functional activity of our cognitive powers. Sighting the future is both a conscious and unconscious activity. We can’t stop it while realizing, dealing, or playing with the moments of the present.

In these moments, our moods also swing like a pendulum, moving back and forth, from past to future while creating new flashes for the present.

Sometimes, journeys to the past contribute to the pleasures of the present. Past is a treasure like an old photo album. It is an asset and a companion. Ask the person lying on a hospital bed for long time. Or when a fatal blow to the past happens to a person with dementia. Moments of the present do not offer a “gift” here.

Moreover, for the society, past is not merely a history, but it is a heritage as well. The identity of a society is based on its heritage.

Past, present, and future are interlinked, and complimenting to each other with indelible events, experiences, karmas, and imaginations. The act of managing the future involves gathering and distilling the right information from the archives of the past within the time span of the present.

Time does not cover the innate past, or cause a pause to our imaginations for the future. It does not flow like a river. It does not fly either. Time rather spreads out. In this spread, past, present and future reside for ever.

It is our mind which ferries us around for stopovers at our memories, and sojourn us to conceive our imaginations, as well as bringing us back to the present. And the life’s journey continues while sailing through our past, present, and future.

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Promod Puri is a journalist and writer. He is author of “Hinduism Beyond Rituals, Customs And Traditions”, a book which explores the rational, secular and progressive nature of Hinduism.

2+2 = 4, Not 5

One school in Hindu philosophy is called Sankhya, which literary means numbers. So it seeks rationality, like 2+2=4, rejecting 2+2=5. In other words a concept has to go thru rational examination before being accepted or rejected. It is unfortunate that those who now claim to be Hindus and forcing its unrealistic rituals and customs, do not seek truth and rationality in their thinking. And that is damaging to Hinduism. https://progressivehindudialogue.com/

Progressive Hindu Dialogue

Progressive Hindu Dialogue is an initiative to explore, recognize and advance the rational, liberal and…

PROGRESSIVEHINDUDIALOGUE.COM

Positive Attitude Helps Beat Cancer

[image error]Meeting Ashok Bhargava,on right, after a couple of months was like welcoming a combating soldier returning home from a winning battle.

Ashok, a long-time friend, is back on the track of his active and scholarly life after going thru several chemos for the treatment of his lymph cancer. Whereas, the doctors attending on him had their own tools and expertise to handle an army of cancerous cells, Ashok’s only weapons to defeat the dreadful attacker were his extremely positive attitude along with pleasant and charming nature.

Ashok is a writer and poet par excellence both in Hindi and English. He is also an avid photographer where nature is his favorite subject. A progressive thinker with utmost faith in the power of God, he spent most his lonely moments during extremely painful treatments with Him, as well with his own positive company which he says was a “learning experience” too.

It was indeed an inspiring get-together at the McDonald over coffee and muffins, which he seldom allows me to buy.

Arundhati Roy’s new novel lays India bare

Arundhati Roy, in 2010. jeanbaptisteparis/Flickr” , CC BY-ND

Malavika Binny, Jawaharlal Nehru University

Wearing two hats at once can be an uncomfortable fit, but it does not seem to bother the author Arundhati Roy, who for most of her life has railed against state excesses and corporate exploitation while also wielding the pen.

Maybe she does not think of these two jobs as different, but rather as extensions of each other.

This, at least, is the impression Roy gives her readers in her latest novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (Hamish Hamilton), which came out in early June. Two decades in the making, the book records the story of India as it transpired over those 20 years.

This contemporary history is told and retold by myriad voices: those of hijras, people who identify themselves as belonging to the third gender or as transgender; of a dalit man (of the lowest castes) who pretends to be Muslim; of Kashmiris, of Indian civil servants, cold-blooded killers and puppet journalists; of adivasis (tribal populations) and of artists, of owls and kittens and of a dung beetle named Guih Kyom.

Roy’s second fiction work was 20 years in the making. Penguin/Amazon, FAL

Locales are similarly wide-ranging. Roy takes readers from a graveyard in Old Delhi to civil war-torn Kashmir and to central Indian forests, where Maoist insurgents fight India’s army. Some of the book transpires too in the 18th-century astronomical site, Jantar Mantar, the only place in Delhi where people are allowed to protest.

Those are just a few of the backdrops in this panoramic novel, which touches on the various Indian social movements that have captured global attention in recent years, from the 2011 anti-corruption Anna Hazare protests to the 2016 Una dalit struggle.

Roy uses the internal contradictions of the movements and the locales to mirror her meandering plotlines, which knit all these skeins together into a kaleidoscopic larger narrative.

It’s an uneasy fit, and the book often feels like it is about to burst at the seams. Still, Roy somehow holds it all together, clumsily yet passionately, leaving no one and nothing out.

Old Delhi is among the settings featured in The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. © Jorge Royan/ Wikimedia Commons, CC BY
Between a graveyard and a valley

Both the margins and the marginalised speak in the Ministry of Utmost Happiness, a feat Roy has also sought to achieve with both her activism and her non-fiction work.

The story follows two characters: Anjum, nee Aftab, a hijra who rejects the politically correct term “transgender”, and Tilo, a Delhi-based architect turned graphic designer who kidnaps a baby from Jantar Mantar.

Anjum’s life is a lens onto an alternate duniya, or world, one where hijras live and learn together, cloistered, following their own rules, regulations and hierarchies.

That changes forever when Anjum travels to Gujarat, a western Indian state that is known for its recent history of religious violence between Hindus and Muslims, and witnesses a massacre. Shortly thereafter, Anjum moves to a graveyard in Old Delhi.

As always, Roy’s brilliance shines most in her choice of locales and the imagery they invoke.

Conflict-beset Kashmir, which Roy has covered extensively in her non-fiction work, features in her latest novel. KashmirGlobal/Flickr, CC BY-SA

In The God of Small Things (1997), the banks of the Meenachil River in southern Kerala served as the space of deviance for the protagonists, where Ammu and Velutha have their escapades and Estha and Rahel get up to mischief.

In The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, the author gives us two contrasting, contradictory settings: a graveyard that becomes a place of life and the verdant Kashmir valley, a space of death and misery.

Anjum starts a guesthouse in the old graveyard, with each room enclosing a grave. Holding feasts for festivals, she invites her friends over to dine regularly at the graveyard-guest house. Later, Tilo moves in permanently with the baby.

The reader understands this resplendent graveyard, which features not just living humans but an impressive stock of animals too, as an ode to tolerating (or, more correctly termed, to accommodating) plurality, a blunt contrast to the truth of modern-day India, with its increasing intolerance towards religious and social differences.

For this, for trying to etch out a semblance of hope, for showing broken things and shattered people coming together to carve out a niche of their own, Roy deserves applause.

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Disparate and intertwined tales

At times all these voices, places and problems escalate into a dissonant cacophony that leaves the reader perplexed, exhausted and grasping at the multiple threads of the plot. But the novel’s brilliance lies in how it captures subtle moments, with attention to detail and sharp compassion.

For instance, the Ustad (master) Kulsoom Bi takes Anjum and the other newly initiated hijra residents to a light and sound show at the Red Fort in Delhi just so they can hear the fleeting but distinct coquettish giggle of a court eunuch. She explains to them that they, the hijras, were not “commoners, but members of the staff of the Royal Palace in the medieval period.”

Hijras, or transgender women in New Delhi’s Panscheel Park. R D´Lucca/Wikimedia, CC BY-SA

These nuggets of everyday history and poetry keep readers hooked, gradually lowering us through each of the story’s many layers and offering moments of clarity in an otherwise tangled mesh.

Some have called Roy’s novel a “fascinating mess”, but frankly when one decides to write a shattered story about all things, the narrative(s) is bound to get fuzzy.

The book may be difficult for those who have not been following Roy and her causes in the long years since God of Small Things. But those who get her intellectual moorings and understand her role as a voice of dissent in today’s climate of “saffronisation” – the spread of extreme-right Hindu values across India, a nation veering hazardously towards authoritarianism, know that the author and her work are one.

Roy’s novel, much like her role as a public intellectual, is a reminder that the world we inhabit is a composite one – a duniya of duniyas – where invisible people, their unrepresented struggles and their unacknowledged yearnings have the right to exist.

Omar Khadr Is A Political Harvest For Tories

 

[image error]

By Promod Puri

Unfortunately, there are no laws in Canada which bar the lawyers who on behalf of government, pursue a legal battle not to seek justice but to influence the justice with directions from the ruling party for its own political motives.

The case in point is the role of the Conservative Party under Harper leadership which has delusively manipulated the file of Omar Khadr with spirited party’s right-wing die-hard ideology to establish him as a terrorist right from his teen years. Using Khadr as a sacrificial goat, the party in its hidden agenda tried to create for itself a better image of its handling of terrorism.

However, the Liberal Government’s $10.5 million settlement with Canadian-born Omar Khadr blocked the tax payers financed Tories’ Machiavellian plan to keep the case alive for perpetual political fueling.

Khadr was just 15 years old 15 years ago when imprisoned in one of world’s most notorious jails accused of killing an American soldier in Afghanistan. America call the torturous Guantanamo jail in occupied Cuba’s land as a detention facility.

It was a long lengthy legal battle. The Conservative government resolutely fought it by spending millions of our dollars but was legally defeated in the fight. The courts were used with intentions to generate publicity for the Conservative government’s anti-terrorism campaign. However, it demonstrated the real motive of the ruling party to seek a ruling prejudiced with politics of hatred and racism against minorities, particularly Muslims as in this case.

Whereas the Supreme Court had explicitly ruled in 2010 that the Canadian authorities violated Mr. Khadr’s charter of rights, Harper, and party in this one of the most expensive legal juggernaut, rather than accepting the judgment, was more interested to get political mileage out of Khadr’s illegal detention and torture.

What the Trudeau government has done is not only to save the public money from more legal costs but more importantly to restore the fundamental rights and freedoms of all Canadians irrespective of their ethnic or religious stripes.

At the same time, unlike the Conservative government under Harper leadership, the Liberal leadership has kept the Canadian justice system above party politics.

Now, as the lessons learned, some safeguards can be enacted whereby the courts can clearly discern if there are seedlings of an astute opportunism which can be a political harvest thru the Canadian justice system.

Otherwise, we tax payers will keep on paying for politics rather than justice.

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Promod Puri resides in Vancouver. He is a writer, and author of Hinduism Beyond Rituals, Customs, and Traditions. Websites: promodpuri.com and progressivehindudialogue.com

Indian Girls Love For Light Skin

By Neha Mishra, Assistant Professor of Law, Reva University of Bangalore and Ronald Hall, Professor of Social Work, Michigan State University

Bleached girls: India and its love for light skin


In India, a light complexion is associated with power, status and beauty, fueling an innovative and growing market of skin-bleaching products.

Adam Jones/Flickr, CC BY-SA

Neha Mishra, Reva University of Bangalore and Ronald Hall, Michigan State University

“Let’s scrub out that tan” is a common refrain in beauty parlours in India, where girls grow up with constant reminders that only fair skin is beautiful.

From Sunday classified ads touting the marriageability of an “MBA graduate. 5-½ ft. English medium. Fair complexion” to elderly aunties advising young women to apply saffron paste to “maintain your skin whiter and smoother”, the signs are everywhere.

Even sentiments like, “She got lucky he married her despite her [dark] complexion” are still whispered around India in 2017.

Younger generations are now starting to push back. On July 7, 18-year-old Aranya Johar published her Brown Girl’s Guide to Beauty on Youtube. The video, a spoken-word poem containing lines like “Forget snow-white/say hello to chocolate brown/I’ll write my own fairy-tale” went viral, reaching 1.5 million viewers around the world in its first day alone.

Aranya Johar’s anti-bleaching poetry went viral.

Johar’s candid slam came just before Bollywood actor Nawazuddin Siddiqui used Twitter to indict the Indian film industry’s racist culture.

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His post recalled the vehement pushback of actress Tannishtha Chatterjee, who was was bullied for her skin tone on live TV in 2016.

Though many Indians still feign ignorance about social discrimination based on skin colour, the country’s obsession with whiteness can also be violent. In recent years, fear of black and brown skin has also spurred harassment and attacks on African students living in India.

Why do Indians so hate their own colour?

The bleaching syndrome

Indian history offers some answers.

Throughout medieval and modern history, the Indian subcontinent has been on the radar of various European settlers and traders, including, from the 15th to 17th centuries, the Portuguese, Dutch and French. The subcontinent was invaded and partly ruled by the Mughals in the 16th century, and colonised by the British from the 17th century onwards until independence in 1947. All these foreign “visitors” were of relatively fair complexion, and many claimed to be superior.

Being subject to a succession of white(ish) overlords has long associated light skin with power, status and desirability among Indians. Today, the contempt for brown skin is embraced by both the ruling class and lower castes, and reinforced daily by beauty magazine covers that feature almost exclusively Caucasian, often foreign, models.

It’s been the dark man’s burden in this majority-non-white nation to desire a westernised concept of beauty, and post-colonial activism has not been able to change this.

Indian women, like all women, come in various shapes, sizes and, yes, colours.

Neha Mishra

According to a study we conducted from 2013 to 2016, 70% of the 300 women and men we interviewed reported wanting a date or partner with someone who had light skin. This colourism is what pushes so many Indians to lighten their skin, creating a phenomenon termed “bleaching syndrome”.

Bleaching syndrome is not a superficial fashion, it’s a strategy of assimilating a superior identity that reflects a deep-set belief that fair skin is better, more powerful, prettier. And it’s not limited to India; skin bleaching is also common in the rest of Asia and in Africa.

A thriving bleaching market

An inventive and growing market of creams and salves has cropped up to fill this demand, which now pulls in over US$400 million dollars annually.

Some of the most widely-sold products include Fem, Lotus, Fair and Lovely and its gendered-equivalent Fair and Handsome. Most of these appealingly named creams are in fact a dangerous cocktail of steroids, hydroquinone, and tretinoin, the long-term use of which can lead to health concerns like permanent pigmentation, skin cancer, liver damage and mercury poisoning among other things.

Various skin-lightening products are found across India and online, no prescription or restrictions required.

Neha Mishra

Nonetheless, a 2014 marketing study found that almost 90% of Indian girls cite skin lightening as a “high need”. These young women are willing to overlook the after-effects of bleaching, and the advent of online sales allows them to use these products in the privacy of their own homes.

Initially focused on feminine beauty, the fairness creams market now also caters to Indian men. Products marketed to men promise to fight sweat, give them fairer underarms and attract women.

Megastar Shahrukh Khan explains that the secret to win a woman’s heart is light skin.

And Bollywood stars with huge followings, including Shahrukh Khan and John Abraham, regularly .

Bleaching backlash

The brand Clean and Dry took bleaching to new levels in 2012, when it began heavily advertising for a new wash to lighten the vagina.

Clean and Dry intimate wash ad compares Indian vaginas and coffee.

This time, women had had enough.

In 2013, the activist group Women of Worth launched their Dark is Beautiful campaign, which was endorsed by the Indian theatre actress Nandita Sen.

With other feminist groups, the women compelled the Advertising Standards Council of India to issue guidelines in 2014 stating that “ads should not reinforce negative social stereotyping on the basis of skin colour” or “portray people with darker skin [as]…inferior, or unsuccessful in any aspect of life particularly in relation to being attractive to the opposite sex”.

This guidance is in keeping with the Indian Constitution, which provides for equality for all (article 14) and prohibits discrimination on the grounds of religion, race, caste, sex or place of birth (article 15).

Unfortunately, the law can do little to stop the subtler forms of racism and bigotry present in Indian society. And, to date, that vagina bleaching product is still on the market.

The “bleaching syndrome” goes far beyond skin colour, with Indian women also questioning their hair texture and colour, speech, marital choices and dress style, raising real concerns about female self-esteem.

As Aranya Johar rhymed on Youtube, “With the hope of being able someday to love another/let’s begin by being our own first lovers”.

Neha Mishra, Assistant Professor of Law, Reva University of Bangalore and Ronald Hall, Professor of Social Work, Michigan State University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Past, Present And Future

By Promod Puri

“The past is history, future is mystery, but today is a gift……”, stay in the present and enjoy the moments. These are some of the many favored in-vogue quotes.

The popular quotations or advisories suggest our prospects belong to the moments we live in. We are told to live, feel, and enjoy the era of the present, rather than being prisoner of the past or future.

The reality is: our past is an assortment of both joyous, rough, memorable, and learning experiences. Whereas, our future lies in the prospect of imagination.

Imagination is an inspiring concept which is very natural foresight in the life of an individual as well as the society we belong to. Civilizations have been created, nourished, and developed on our ability to contemplate about the future.

No doubt, anxieties, worries or concerns often become parts of our contemplations, but so do the dreams. In this package, destiny is created thru our forward-looking karmas of the present which influence our future. Progress comes by prospecting at the future.

Flights to the future with optimistic imaginations are the thrills and promises of the prospective unknown.

Prospecting is natural. It is a functional activity of our cognitive powers. Sighting the future is both a conscious and unconscious activity. We can’t stop it while realizing, dealing, or playing with the moments of the present.

In these moments, our moods also swing like a pendulum, moving back and forth, from past to future while creating new flashes for the present.

Sometimes, journeys to the past contribute to the pleasures of the present. Past is a treasure like an old photo album. It is an asset and a companion. Ask the person lying on a hospital bed for long time. Or when a fatal blow to the past happens to a person with dementia. Moments of the present do not offer a “gift” here.

Moreover, for the society, past is not merely a history, but it is a heritage as well. The identity of a society is based on its heritage.

Past, present, and future are interlinked, and complimenting to each other with indelible events, experiences, karmas, and imaginations. The act of managing the future involves gathering and distilling the right information from the archives of the past within the time span of the present.

Time does not cover the innate past, or cause a pause to our imaginations for the future. It does not flow like a river. It does not fly either. Time rather spreads out. In this spread, past, present and future reside for ever.

It is our mind which ferries us around for stopovers at our memories, and sojourn us to conceive our imaginations, as well as bringing us back to the present. And the life’s journey continues while sailing through our past, present, and future.

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Promod Puri is a journalist and writer. He is author of “Hinduism Beyond Rituals, Customs And Traditions”, a book which explores the rational, secular and progressive nature of Hinduism.