Off The Cuff: A wry look at life

I have a sneaking suspicion that Michael Jackson is a prospective Indian mother-in-law in disguise, because who else can be so obsessed with the colour of the skin?

Indian mothers are very ambitious for their sons. If you glance through the matrimonials in newspapers you will find very demanding ads such as: 'Wanted beautiful girl with fair-complexion....'

That's only a starter. '... who is a doctor, a good cook, a U.S. green-card holder, who has pots of money and is from an aristocratic family.' And the son silently salivates in the background like Scooby-Doo and goes, "Yeah, Yeah."

I wonder why they want girls from an aristocratic family, because aristocracy and feudalism is a funny-sad part of Indian history and nawabs and maharajahs of that era were even more eccentric and weirder than Jacko. (Satyajit Ray, the award-winning director has captured that era of indulgence and excesses wonderfully in the movie, The Chess Players).

Before quacks moved into the business of growing hair on bald pates of middle-aged men, herbal doctors in India got into a more lucrative venture of promising 'wheat-complexions' (whatever that is) for Indian girls.

I was watching Pakistan TV recently and a commercial came on and guess what? It was for a skin-whitener and how a girl finally gets married because she uses this cream and turns pale. (Besides their curiously bizarre love for cricket, the other thing Indians and Pakistanis have in common is their colour bias and prejudice).

You can buy the cream tubes at any Indian and Pakistani store in Dubai. When I curiously picked one up, called "Fair and Lovely", of course, from the shelf, a catchy jingle came to mind: Michael Jackson was black once. His children think he is white It doesn't matter whether you are tri-coloured Jagmag will make sure you will shine.

The Hollywood musical My Fair Lady was a hit in India when it was released many years ago in movie theatres around the country, not because of Loewe and Lerner's wonderful lyrics, or Audrey Hepburn's charm or Rex Harrision's masterful rendition of a linguist professor, but I suspect, because of the word, 'fair' in the title.

A few months after its release, hundreds of salons and tailor shops around the country were renamed as, "My Fair Tailor' or "My Fair Hairdresser'. One thing I was sure, my barber definitely didn't look like Audrey Hepburn.

Kids can be even more cruel than today's despots. One of my cousins was a real looker like Halle Berry, the Oscar winning black actress, but she would get teased by kids in her school because of her colour. So she resorted to using talcum powder and whenever she passed by we would blow on her face, and she would leave in her wake a powdery trail like the victim of a vampire.

Some 'tweens' in Canada who have fish-belly white complexions go to tanning salons to turn brown. They go and lie down in steel coffins and come out of these places looking like George Hamilton, the perpetually tanned actor, who's famous not because of his acting prowess, but because whenever he comes on screen, you only thing you notice is his bone-white teeth.

I haven't seen the BBC documentary on Michael Jackson by Martin Bashir, but I suppose its only human nature to want to be something you cannot be. He has also blamed his nuttiness on his father who reportedly taunted him and hit him when he was young.

I was in an Indian school some years ago. The report cards were being handed out. One teacher apparently had said something about a boy's marks. Suddenly, the father of the kid whacked him a hard one on the back of his head.

Scholarship in India is very stress-full for kids and I am sure it is breeding millions of Jackos of the future.