I was, to misquote Anthony Kiedis, road tripping with three or four of my favourite allies when they told me a dismaying piece of IPL trivia. One of the clubs, during a match at the Mohali venue, fielded a squad of cheerleaders and the crowd at the stadium booed them off because they included a couple of black girls. What's more, the management team at the venue meekly withdrew the "offending" cheer girls and fielded an all-white squad to placate the crowd.
Could this be happening, in a country like ours, all the better placed to understand the evils of racial oppression and discrimination on the basis of colour? It makes me wonder if it is, in fact, this long history of our own subjugation by "white imperialists" that made the crowd in the stadium that day subliminally feel they were now entitled to the boot on the other foot?
Or was it just the not-so-subliminal Fair & Lovely complex talking? Fair equals beautiful, dark equals ugly. We came here to see beautiful cheerleaders, so either bring on the fair girls or give us our money back. We in India should be used to it, with fairness creams lining the shelves in every supermarket and screaming at you on TV every few minutes for decades now.
Either way, the sentiment was appalling. Appalling enough coming from a mob of presumably under-educated, "nut-cracking, orange-peeling" sports fans. But that it was put into action unquestioningly by management and media sophisticates I find hard to stomach.
