Innholdsfortegnelse for 14 April 2025 i India Today

Abureaucrat’s competence, dedication or leadership has nothing to do with the shade of their skin. Yet, India’s deeply rooted bias around skin colour doesn’t spare anyone, not even those at the very top of the administrative ladder. Take the case of Sarada Muraleedharan, a respected Indian Administrative Service (IAS) officer from the 1990 batch. In September 2024, she took charge as Kerala’s Chief Secretary, stepping into the role after her husband and fellow officer V. Venu. While comparisons between the two might have been expected, the kind she encountered revealed something far more insidious. In a heartfelt Facebook post on March 25, she recounted a comment someone made about her work: “It is as black as my husband’s was white.” Her response wasn’t defensive. It was reflective and deeply moving.…

POULOMI DAS | 29 | Model-actress Two months ago, Poulomi Das was on the verge of bagging a lead role in a TV show only to learn that the channel rejected her on grounds of her skin colour. “I got to know from friends at the channel that they didn’t take me because ‘she is too dark, she should look like an MD’ (Managing Director),” Poulomi recounts. “These channels which show women empowerment, they are bullsh***ing. If you look into their minds, it’s full of garbage and outdated ideas. In India, none of us is white. It’s 200 years of British colonisation and the prejudiced mindset which still persists.” Naysayers and bullies don’t deter Poulomi who proudly goes as ‘The Brown Queen’ on Instagram. She has learned to give it back…

PREETI DAS | 48 | Actor, stand-up performer and story-teller My dark skin has always been a source of curiosity and a lot of resentment. As a teenager, I was turned down by two elite boutiques saying we don’t have clothes that will suit your skin colour, please try elsewhere. The jibes cut as deep today. As an actor, only a few stereotyped roles come your way. But the terminology that industry employs is even more shocking: make-up artists are often briefed to apply ‘Dalit’ or ‘tribal’ make-up—both insinuating ‘burn her skin’. Once, after a stand-up performance, amidst applause, a light-skinned lady came up to me and said, “Brilliant…though you are dark-skinned, you are beautiful inside.” There are many jokes I laugh at, though they are not funny. My husband happens…

The titular story in Namita Gokhale’s Life on Mars: Collected Stories follows a woman who befriends an unusual young man the same age as her emotionally distant sons. The story derives its name from a passage where Gokhale makes a poignant connection between the stereotypical imagery of Martians as ‘little green men’, and a group of doctors in their green-hued scrubs, huddled around the woman as she enters the hospital. “Before I knew it, I was in hospital, being wheeled around on a rattling trolley—well, not a trolley but a stretcher, and there were arc lights and men in green overalls wearing masks. As the anaesthesia got to me, I discovered that I was on Mars, there were masked men in green overalls everywhere, and life on Mars wasn’t really…

Experimental filmmaker Amit Dutta is a work-horse. His new film, Rhythm of a Flower, an 81-minute animated biopic of singing legend Kumar Gandharva, was part of the International Film Festival Rotterdam in February, after winning the Golden Gateway Award at the Mumbai Film Festival last year. In March, Stream-Story, Dutta’s documentary on the streams of the Kangra Valley in Himachal Pradesh, and how they sustain the life and culture of the locals, premiered at the Cinéma du Réel in Paris. The same month, a book of Dutta’s Dogri-language poems, translated into English, was published. A book of letters on filmmaking for children in Hindi and an English-language children’s book are on the way. Categorisations of Dutta as the country’s best filmmaker Indians are not aware of, with their myth-making of…

Q. What is the thought behind your dance production Anuttar? Through its three acts—‘Akhir Kyon’, ‘Shakuni’ and ‘Toota Yeh Vishwas Kyon’—Anuttar subtly stirs the collective consciousness of society. It highlights the struggles faced by women, the girl child and marginalised LGBTQ+ sections of society, especially the trans community. Q. Haven’t social themes been central to your dance productions from the beginning of your career? In 1982, I presented a dance on environmental degradation when nobody even discussed the issue. I have also covered themes like bonded labour and abuse of women in my work. The approach isn’t sermonising, yet it sends a strong message to the audience. Q. What’s your take on the representation of kathak in Indian cinema? It pains me to see the Techno Kathak of today. The…

M amata Banerjee arrived in London on March 23, her flight 10 hours behind schedule. Undeterred, the West Bengal chief minister was in Hyde Park next morning, fitting in her signature morning exercises before embarking on her packed six-day itinerary. She met business leaders to pitch her state as an investment destination, pushed for the revival of a Kolkata-London direct flight and attended a reception hosted by India’s high commissioner. The centrepiece of her visit was a speech at Oxford’s Kellogg College. It was not the usual pugnacity on show. Instead, a softer elocution flowed—keywords like “women-focused initiatives”, and its Bengal exemplar, “Kanyashree”. For her supporters, it was a triumphant tour. A Trinamool Congress (TMC) MLA, eager to dramatise its significance, compared it to Sourav Ganguly’s famous celebration at Lord’s…

Nearly six months and two assembly sessions are over since the new Haryana government took over, but the state Congress still seems to be in such shock over its poll defeat that it has yet to elect a legislative leader. The 77-year-old ex-CM, Bhupinder Singh Hooda, has been shouldering the responsibility till now, bearing the regular taunts of the ruling BJP, including from CM Nayab Saini, about his “unofficial” status. Following back-to-back defeats in three assembly elections and two Lok Sabha contests, a team of senior Congress leaders—Ashok Gehlot, Partap Singh Bajwa, and Ajay Maken—was sent as observers to the state. Their report is with the party high command but no decision has been taken on the leader of the Opposition. For, the Haryana Congress is a divided house, with…

RITIKA ANIL KUMAR | 28 | Communications manager, Creatnet Education, Delhi When Ritika speaks about the prejudice she endured due to her dark skin, her amused chuckle masks years of navigating societal biases that began in early childhood. During her formative years at a Christian school in Tiruvalla, Kerala, classmates taunted her with derogatory nicknames like “Blackie”, “Black Beauty” and “African”. Even at the tender age of six, Ritika sensed something was “not right” about her skin tone, a perception reinforced by relatives who frequently compared her to her lighter-skinned brother. Well-intentioned but harmful “treatments” suggested by her grandmother further cemented the notion that her dark complexion was somehow undesirable. The unwavering support from her physician parents helped Ritika develop resilience against colourist remarks. Her mother’s wisdom—“your outside does not determine…

From advanced filtration systems to canned air, the market is flooded with solutions promising to help people breathe cleaner air PORTABLE AIR PURIFIER Small, at times wearable, purifiers using ionisation technology (electrical charges to remove pollutants) ₹3,000–5,000 Impact: Not enough power to counter extremely high levels of toxic air ADVANCED HEPA FILTER AIR PURIFIER New-gen purifiers with three-layer filtering—prefilter, H13 HEPA filter and activated carbon filter—removing 99.9% of airborne particles ₹20,000–50,000 Impact: Expensive but keeps indoor air clean ANTI-POLLUTION PAINT Some firms promote toxin-free indoor paints that eliminate harmful chemicals like formaldehyde Price: Varies Impact: Expensive but helps reduce indoor pollutants CLEAN AIR IN A CAN Bottled air from regions known for pristine air quality—Switzerland, Norway or Lake Como—now sold in cans ₹2,000-4,000 Impact: No proven effect on human health…

IN 21st century India, it does not matter that you are a woman who has broken the glass ceiling. Just a stray, unfeeling comment can transport you back to a place of insecurity that you thought you had left far behind. A time when the darker shade of your skin put you in the shadows, unseen, unheard and unwanted. Sarada Muraleedharan was in that place recently. Courtesy a careless remark thrown at her about her tenure as Kerala chief secretary being as black as her husband’s was white, the black labelling bearing “the quiet subtext of being a woman”. Long inured to the casual colourism she had encountered all her life, Sarada decided to “call this one out” on a Facebook post simply because of the speaker’s implied equivalence of black with…

SNIGDHA NAIR | 25 | Assistant film director She was just two and a half years old when she had come home from playschool and put her hand next to her mother’s and pronounced: “Kikka (Snigdha’s pet name) kaali, mama gori”—I’m black, mamma is fair. “My mother was heartbroken,” she recalls, “and went to the nursery that very day to ask what was said in school.” For Snigdha, the episode demonstrates how discrimination against dark skin begins early, even before a child can string a sentence together. In school, she’d be called “kaali saand” (black bull), and in Class 10 she would find herself kicked out of the dance group because her complexion did not suit the composition of the rest of the group. “That’s when it struck me hard, that…

It’s not just actresses who face colourism in the film industry. Actor Nawazuddin Siddiqui has spoken up about how “more than nepotism”, the industry is afflicted by “racism”, as a result of which talented actors are overlooked for meaty parts and offered tertiary roles instead. Casting calls seeking “fair-skinned” actors, particularly for the female parts, are still too frequent. Bollywood actors may have learned their lesson in not endorsing fairness products after sizeable backlash, but the industry’s portrayal of dark-skinned characters continues to be narrow-minded and stereotypical. Even its attempt to advocate against discrimination of dark-skinned people misfired as happened in Bala (2019) when actress Bhumi Pednekar was brownfaced for the part. In her paper, ‘The Brownfaced Bollywood: An Analysis on the Presentation of Dark-Skinned Characters in Bollywood Films’,…

Back in 2022, when actor Manav Kaul asked Achal Mishra to tag along for his meeting with renowned author Vinod Kumar Shukla at his home in Raipur, he knew a film could come out of it. “I went over-prepared,” Mishra tells india today. The filmmaker carried two cameras, tripods and an entire lot of sound-recording equipment. But fate had other plans. For a significant portion of the day, he found himself unable to shoot anything as he turned into a starstruck fan whenever Shukla, the 2024 Jnanpith award winner and now 88, started speaking. “I ended up just listening,” he says. Mishra couldn’t believe his luck—that he was in the same room as one of Hindi’s greatest living writers and, incidentally, also the only Indian recipient of the PEN/Nabokov Award…

The personal is never far from the political in the music of folk singer/songwriter Ditty. “My experiences are a starting point to speak about larger issues,” says the Delhiraised, Berlin-based artist whose recently released second solo album KALI covers themes such as colourism (“Kali”), consumerism (“Money”), ecological conservation (“Azadi”) and global conflict 56 INDIA (“Duniya”). “I really enjoy singing about topics like capitalism or the climate because they are things you can’t always speak about and have conversations about,” says Ditty, among the handful of Indian musicians to have staged carbon-neutral tours. In 2021, she put out the album Rain Is Coming as part of the trio Faraway Friends, a project that emerged out of her work with the German water rights NGO Viva con Agua. Most of KALI, which…