Maya, melanin and madness
‘Honey, can you swing by the grocery store and pick up a tube of fairness cream. Perhaps more people will read my blog if I become fair!’
Where did I get this brilliant idea from? TV, of course!
Every day on TV I see advertisements that promise us the holy grail of becoming fair and white in 3 days to 3 weeks. And the incredible things that can happen once fairness is achieved! Here is sampling of some TV advts: There is an ad that promises you more confidence if you become fair. Yet another promises you a better job (don’t ask me how!) You will get a better boyfriend if you are fair. There is even a ‘Fair and Handsome’ cream for men. Hey, gender equality works both ways, right? You will be more popular if you are fair. And if you are the make-up artist’s daughter, you can become fairer than the actress he applies make-up on using a cream and then tell her, ‘beauty lies beneath the skin.’ Of course, no one will hear you say it when you are dark. If all this is possible, why not increased blog-readership, eh?
There is another cream that says it will reduce melanin, the pigment that makes skin look dark. Melanin does one other small thing. I believe it helps in preventing skin cancer. But, hey! What the heck? You become fair, right? Never mind if you have the IQ of a wooden spoon or the EQ of a dead goat. Just become fair and life will instantly become a bed of roses. Lord Krishna was dark. Lord Rama was dark. We will sing their praises and take their name constantly…in the hope they make us fair, our bridegrooms fairer and our brides the fairest of them all!
What is it with Indian consumers? Perhaps, elsewhere too? What is this obsession with becoming fair? Its about a decade since I saw advts in the US and Canada. I don’t know how it is there these days. I would probably have some activist group crying to have my hide if I put up advts like this in the US.
If I was living in a country where people have naturally fair skin (gasp!), I would have probably written about their obsession with acquiring the perfect tan! Either way there seems to be one obsession or the other about how we look. Its baffling, right? If you have melanin, you want to dive into a vat of some cosmetic chemical to reduce it. And if you dont have enough of melanin, you want to sit under the sun applying a different chemical to the skin…and hope to get darker! Melanin must be the modern name for maya! Totally mysterious and confusing yet driving half of the cosmetic sales around the world!
Scriptures call this obsession with the body and how it looks a negative vasana. This intense identification with the body is a big obstacle in the path of the sadhaka. And these small everyday obsessions point out the level of identification we have with our body. The ancients break this vasana into three types:
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False identification with the self
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False acquisition of grace and
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False relief from inherent evil
False identification with the self is taking this body as oneself. It is due to lack of discrimination and this leads to all sorts of evil. I believe it is the Chhandogya Upanishad which has the episode of Virochana who, in spite of proper instruction, took his body to be the self and taught the same to his asura clan. The Taittiriya Upanishad also speaks of the false identification with the body as the self. Acharya Shankara has written about it in many places.
The acquisition of bodily grace is of two types, worldly and religious. The worldly type refers to attempts to acquire a mellifluous voice, soft and fragrant skin (fairness included!), wearing fine clothes & ornaments etc. The other type, namely the religious variety, is taking dips in holy waters etc. Once somebody is hooked on to these pursuits, it drags them down very quickly. Acquisition of bodily grace is impossible given the nature of the body itself. For example, how much of honey or pepper water can one consume to get a mellifluous voice?
Acquiring relief from the inherent problems of the body is also considered an evil by the scriptures. Use of fragrances and the like give the olfactory nerves a treat, but hide the fact that the fragrant smell is of the external object and not of the body intrinsically. No amount of perfume can change the smell of body intrinsically. If it did Dior, YSL, Chanel and others will be out of business! The ancients have said that the bodies with nine holes in them continue to leak like earthen pots; no amount of external washing can purify them and as for internal purification, it is simply impossible.
The scriptures strongly discourage the acquisition of bodily grace and the like. The scriptures don’t tell you to stop taking medicines when ill or taking a bath before going to work. All these are practically required for a healthy well being. But over indulgence in so far as the body is concerned reinforces the belief that the body is the self. If the addiction to making the body look better is high, the stronger the belief ‘I am the body’ gets. It obstructs the rise of knowledge in seekers. Sage Vasishtha tells Lord Rama. ‘The conviction, “From head to foot I am only the form which my father and mother gave me,” is, O Rama, born of a wrong point of view and leads to bondage. That is walking into death’s trap…this way of thinking must, by all means, be given up, even if confronted with utter ruin. One, desirous of one’s own good, should not come in contact with it – the thought “I am this body.”
