Who’s afraid of Barbie doll?

We were, my husband and I. To us, Barbies were the spawn of Satan. For one thing, buying the pink-packaged horror, with her various accessories and hangers-on, could set you back a vital organ or two.

But more importantly, there’s just the wrongness of her appearance. The pincer waist, plastic-perfect legs, silky-smooth (and mostly peach) skin — the doll seems more part of a paedophile’s fantasy than a child’s toy.

What is really unforgivable, though, is the fact that the Barbie doll can’t stand. Its feet arch exaggeratedly to convey high-heeled shoes and so, unsupported, it plops down flat. Way to go, Mattel: a doll which is over-the-top in its ‘femininity’ and, hey, it won’t stand on its own! And don’t throw ‘Smart Barbie’ at me, dude — the Barbies with computers and stethoscopes.

Hard to write software or diagnose medical conditions when all you can do is slouch at 60 degrees, feet-up-in-the-air, no?

Perversely, little girls everywhere seem drawn to Barbie like lemmings to a cliff. Or maybe it’s the bubblegum-pink box which sings to them like the sapera’s been in a Hindi film about snakes!
Before our kid happened, we refused to buy our little nieces Barbies. It seemed so wrong somehow.

How could their parents be endorsing this? What if the kid grew up wanting to look like that? Well, having a kid sorted us out. At two, we caught ours staring transfixed at a wall of bubblegum-pink Barbie boxes in a toy store.

Devastated but hopeful, we took down a box and told her that she could play with it here, but couldn’t take it home. She fell for it twice. The third time she went totally ballistic.

Pride was swallowed and we ‘allowed’ friends to gift her Barbies. So the Barbies came — a blond vision and a dusky one. The blonde was totally within the Aryan racial requirements, while the other, a token coffee-brown, had the same chiseled-Aryan features. We shuddered.

At birthday parties, I sit in a corner, pathetically waving my anti-Barbie jhanda. Ignoring the noise I am making, moms rave about their kids’ Barbie collections. One gushes, “Playing with Barbies makes kids imaginative, you know!” Really, lady?

And all I get from the endless buying spree it prompts is that your kid might grow up to be a brand-obsessed mall-dweller! While one mom’s kid has 23 Barbies, another’s has 27. Oh, but the one with 23 has a Barbie pool, kitchen and computer as well. Please ignore me while I puke into my pav bhaji.

But the good thing about kids is that they are such twisted little rats. Using her chiselled goddess, our kid and her grandma devised an interesting game.

A child-gobbling yakshi (Malayalam for witch) was on the prowl. All the fat teddy bears and cloth dolls were in danger. Mom, brandishing a Barbie, lunged at them, shouting, “I’m a yakshi and I’ll eat these babies!” Kid grabbed the nearest ink-stained, pug-nosed doll and fled, laughing excitedly, squealing. Barbie as Evil Yakshi? Mom explained, “When it came to deciding on which doll would be the witch, she chose Barbie. She said she loves the others too much.”

Since then, I’ve noticed that many little girls reinvent their Barbies: feed them to pets, use them as hammers, dip their heads in ink, take apart their limbs for ‘scientific’ studies, trade them for board games with ‘correct’ parents.

So kids who ask me for a Barbie now get them. I buy them with my fingers crossed, though, hoping the kid finds some truly inventive torture for her Great Blonde Airhead. That would make the 600 bucks I just sloshed down the drain a totally worthwhile spend!

(Anita Vachharajani writes children’s books when she’s not busy mucking up her one go at being a devoted mom)