Fashion, Food and Gleaming Smiles

It’s a sign of progress that Indian villagers are enticed away from the row of dusty shacks that are their local High Street and head off to visit the towns and the air-conditioned shopping malls that are festooned with labels and brands and racist posters portraying all kinds of beauty products.

Yes, “racist.”  Marketing racism is rife throughout India, and it’s a subtle form of commercial pressure. 

Mediterranean skin-tones and glamorous Indian hair

I am not talking about ethnic divisions in everyday society, nor discrimination against people of different religions, though this may well exist in different areas. What I am talking about is racism within normal society, in the way Indians themselves choose to value their appearance. 
It is comparable to the way that unrealistically svelte, photo-shopped images of female models dominate European fashion advertising, even though they are unrepresentative of at least 99% of women in society. 

In Indian advertisements, a dark complexion is considered socially inferior, and fashion models appear to have impossibly pale skin. What makes them Indian is the thick rope of jet-black hair, the full, dark eye-brows and clearly defined eye make-up, but the fashionable skin-tone is always, let’s say, something north of Sheffield in February.

As one travels, it seems so much of the world is chasing Europe and America, and the economic growth reveals itself through the growth of fast-food outlets.

Burgers and pizzas in cities throughout India

Pizza is universal, alongside bottled fizzy drinks, bottled water, (filtered mains supply – not from a natural spring,) and coffee. Slices of sweet, white aerated bread make sandwiches that are filled with cheese and tomato and smothered with mayonnaise. Thankfully, traditional Indian street food is still to be found, though not by someone who is aiming to see the benefits of a total detox in a loosening of the waist-band. 

The full Bollywood smile

But I wasn’t after a snack this morning; today, I wanted to visit the dentist; - and here is another market that is following western consumer trends. 

Everyone wants the full Bollywood smile treatment. While this costs hundreds in UK and thousands in USA, in India the full course, covering a year, costs just £120.

Chippy Thrideep is the village dentist, and an increasing proportion of her work is now cosmetic work for the teenage children of the rising Indian middle class. I met her on my last visit and thought I might as well give her my custom again, and have a full check-up, scale and polish while I was staying in the village, - her practice is just a couple of hundred yards up the road from Mattindia. Ms Chippy Thrideep, impressed me when I was last here, both with her gentle skills and with the ultra-modern facilities of her spotless surgery. She is petite, barely five feet tall with glamorous looks and a sparkling smile. She and her assistant made light work of giving my teeth a thorough clean and polish, after which she explained that one of my fillings, at the front near the gum-line, needed repairing. I told her to go ahead, and she executed the job carefully, with material that matched perfectly. 

My personal tooth-fairy

I would dearly like to have Chippy as my dentist and personal tooth-fairy if she were based in Lincolnshire, but she would never survive if she were earning her Kerala rates. 

Her total bill for half-an-hour of cleaning, scraping, polishing and filling amounted to just under £10.