04Sep
A socio-political cabaret I viewed in India in the fall of 2004 was titled A Deep Fried Jam. It was staged at the annual fundraiser organized by Mobile Crèches – an NGO that builds mobile creches for migrant laborers and their families. To put that in context, construction workers in India sometimes live on these sites in […]
Read More21Mar
It’s here, a witty culture jam from India! Calling out our worldwide, multi-billion dollar fairness cream industry and its unfortunate consumers. Gore gote, (pronounced goray gotay), literally means, light-skinned “balls” in the hindi language. Yes, literally. Out loud. In the face. Clearly, it’s a response to fairness creams in general, with a special shout out […]
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07Nov
An Indian “biopic” called The Dirty Picture (2011), did exceedingly well. Critics, feminists included, saw the film favorably. It collected giant returns at the box office, Balan won raving reviews, including a national award for Best Actress, and everyone went home happy. I too, had been excited to watch an 80’s film. The lead, Vidya […]
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24Sep
I recently met a design student and as we got talking about race and color, she shared a nuanced observation about children’s dolls at Ikea. She said the ethnically different dolls had been placed in separate bins, which she found shocking, “in this day and age.” I began thinking about the famous 1940s study in […]
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02Sep
DO NOT ignore the look of your organization’s logo-based social media icons, says Heather Mansfield, author of Social Media for Social Good and owner of DIOSA Communications. On Nonprofit Tech 2.0 Blog: A Social media guide for nonprofits, she talks about an very important component of branding in the social media world that you just […]
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03Aug
Here’s an interview with Professor Radhika Parameswaran, Professor in the School of Journalism at Indiana University, Bloomington. She has been researching colorism—a term originally defined by Black scholars– in media culture, and more specifically, in media like comic books and advertising. After having met virtually, 18 months prior, we finally met in June 2012 to […]
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25Jul
Several girls, from infancy, carry the burden of marriage on their young shoulders. And if that weren’t enough, there’s the added worry of skin colour that decides your fate, both for social acceptance and future marriage. If on the fair/light side, it’s a privilege you’re born with. If on the dark/brown side, it could range […]
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01Aug
So here I am, teeheeing reading this news in NYTs Media Decoder this past weekend. The person who got behind this banning photoshopped images in magazines is Jo Swinson also the co-founder of The Campaign for Body Confidence. And so, the impossible seems to have happened. In U.K., two L’Oreal foundation ads, one for Maybeline’s […]
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19Jul
He writes up God Krishna as a playboy. Compares a sacred ritual―where the god is given a symbolic bath―to a foot scrub at a seven-star spa. To him, Shiva’s celebrity was affected by his “exceptional luck with branding.” That’s NYT’s Holland Cotter writing about about “Vishnu: Hinduism’s Blue-skinned Savior,” an exhibition currently running at the […]
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