"Would you be my life partner?” asked this pretty young thing from the pop-up window. She's 26 and is an architect in Mumbai, said the caption. Well, Anita, I would love to be your partner but for the fact that my wife here, sitting next to me, would severely disapprove of such an act. Anybody who surfs any Indian site on the net comes across these matrimonial pop-ups. Beautiful young ladies (or perhaps their parents) looking for the NRI hubby or NRI lads looking for a match from back home.

My interest in this activity dates back to my college days when I used to go through the weekend matrimonial page of Times of India with friends. These ads can get pretty detailed. We have all those mind-boggling permutations and combinations of region, religion, caste, gothram, sub-this, sub-that, education, dough being earned, height, weight, etc., which could eat up quite a bit of teraflops in a supercomputer. The most intriguing aspect for me however was the term "wheatish complexion" that showed up in a majority of them (i.e. those that didn't say fair-complexioned).

Now, what exactly is a wheatish complexion? I did a google on "wheatish" and came up with mostly Indian matrimonial sites. The dictionaries didn’t throw up anything either. It shows up as an erroneous spelling in MS Word. The word itself, it seems, is purely an Indian invention to denote a brown person. The colour of wheat, it’d seem, is what Indians prefer once they have failed to achieve the “fair” complexion. I looked at my body and realized that perhaps I could also pass off as wheatish. A discerning closet racist might disagree, but I feel that all these years in temperature-controlled rooms with no sunlight had lightened my original urad dal or black gram complexion.

I always wondered where the non-wheatish, non-fair-complexioned people in this country are and why they never put their matrimonial ads out. Don’t such people get married? Either there are only these two skin colours (or three, if you include the “very fair”) in India or we have a whole bunch of people in self-denial, clinging on to distorted and irrational crap thrust upon them by a society that is yet to kick out its prejudices based on religion, caste and colour. Imagine what we’re losing out in terms of colourful descriptions. We could have, in addition to the aforementioned urad dal complexion, the red kidney bean look, the black sesame seed look (which is more like the urad dal look but a bit more lustrous), the genetically modified wheatish complexion (with a bit of radioactive fluorescence thrown in), the basmati rice anaemic complexion etc. The possibilities are infinite, but unfortunately we still hang on to just two.

I have vague memories of a movie that I saw in my childhood where the actor playing the role of Lord Krishna was painted blue. Krishna, the mythology says, is a cowherd and the dark colour goes with the job, unless you’re using high SPF sunscreen lotions and parasols, which I doubt he used. I fervently hope that one day our guys get real and use a real life “shiny black sesame seed-complexioned” guy for Krishna’s role in a movie (and I don’t mean the art movies).

Interesting news from the caste, colour front. The two main caste-based groups in Kerala have decided to band together to fight the discrimination meted out to them. This move portends a bright future for the State. There was a time when many “right” thinking people thought this place was going down the tubes with its awful secular and progressive society. However, the fact that these organizations have survived and is getting entrenched with each passing day has allayed any such fears. This obviously warms the cockles of the hearts and other organs of the “right” thinking people. It fits in with their worldview. The other day one of the groups organized a big rally to highlight the neglect being heaped on their community over the past few decades. Interestingly, this rally was staged in one of the most neglected State capitals in the country. Well, I’ll have to wish them success. I can’t wait to see the day when they succeed in stopping the minorities from carving up the place and then start trying to carve it up between them. These are essentially people who despise each other in private. Would be fun to see how this unravels in the next few years.

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My Jet-black Wheatish Complexion