Veteran adman Prahlad Kakkar made a statement on television this Sunday — “You take brown skinned girls to your hotel room, fair skinned ones to your mother.”
Taking up the cudgels for brown-skinned girls were music director Vishal Dadlani and actor Vivek Oberoi. On Twitter, calling the adman a “moron”, Vishal says, “This was national TV and an extremely silly, bigoted and prejudicial thing to say. Our country already has too much language, race, gender and colour discrimination. It’s probably just a sensationalist statement, meant to get him eyeballs, but very irresponsible.”
Sharing his concern, actor Vivek Oberoi reacted, “I wonder how many young impressionable girls would have watched the show and how they felt about the colour of their skin, their self-esteem?” Dusky actor Bipasha Basu says it’s a ridiculous statement, but thinks Kakkar did not mean it that way. She says, “Ninety-nine per cent of Indian population is brown. It’s a ridiculous statement. I am sure he did not mean it.”
Kakkar, on the other hand, is not perturbed. “It’s men like Vishal who are conscious of their own hypocrisy and reacting so strongly to this. I am glad I am the one who set the cat among the pigeons. What I meant was that about 50-60 percent of Indian men are hypocritical enough to think that they can date and bed dusky women but they should end up marrying fair ones. I am not projecting hypocrisy, I am reflecting it. I am just the bearer of bad news — you can’t crucify me for that. Even our movies typecast fair women as sati savitris and dusky ones as the ones you desire and want to bed.”
Dusky Diandra Soares accepts this fact. “I don’t think of this as a derogatory statement, because it is a fact with most Indian men. Even for ad campaigns, fair girls with light eyes are opted over the dusky ones.” Adds model Candice Pinto, “Prahlad gave his viewpoint but I think it is just the reflection of what an average Indian man thinks.”
(Inputs by Vidya Prabhu)
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