‘Beautiful’ pressure
   Date :18-Sep-2019

 
Actress Nandita Das, who is known to speak her heart out about societal imbalances, feels that women are constantly under pressure to look beautiful, which shouldn’t be the case. Nandita Das’ 2013 campaign, ‘Dark Is Beautiful’, gained a lot of momentum as it brought forward issue of colour discrimination that men and women face in society. She has always insisted on celebrating the beauty in all skin colour and in the same attempt, Das recently shot a two-minute anthem surrounding the same topic.
 
Titled as India’s Got Colour, song features Ali Fazal, Radhika Apte, Konkona Sensharma, Gul Panag, Divya Dutta, Tannishtha Chatterjee, Tillotama Shome, Sayani Gupta and Suchitra Pillai amongst others. Nandita Das says there is a need to put the ‘unity in diversity’ line to practice but such is the level of discrimination that fair is considered lovely in a country where 90 per cent of the population has dark skin. “India does have a lot of shades and we are not celebrating it. We have been hearing ‘there is unity in diversity’ but we are not practising it. There is so much diversity in terms of religion, skin colour, languages, sexual preference, we are always creating a sense of them and us. I think it is time we celebrate our diversity.” Das says discrimination on the basis of skin colour is the most absurd.
 
“Skin colour is the bare minimum. Why would you want to discriminate? A lot of young women come up to me and say that this campaign has validated the way they feel about themselves. “It is a campaign started in 2013 by a Chennai based organisation called ‘Women of Worth’. There are so many issues women are fighting, I did not think (the issue of) skin colour needs stand alone attention. (But) so many people lose their confidence, their self-esteem because of skin colour.” “We need to stop calling ‘dark is beautiful’ as we women don’t need to be burdened by looking beautiful all the time. We just want to say, whatever your colour, be comfortable. And let’s celebrate diversity,” she says.