Unfairness in fairness

We Indians tend to have a morbid obsession of people with good looks and a fair skin. I was discussing this topic with friends and this always kind of feels like one of life's unjust moments.

One of my friends put a good example: Consider two chicks approaching. One with a dark complexion and one fair (assuming both are decent looking). The tendency with most of the people is to always give more importance to the fair looking person. The dark person almost always gets ignored.

What it means is that the dark people are always at a disadvantage when it comes to matters of attraction. The reason being a natural tendency of people to judge a person by his/her looks and skin color. Fairness cream companies laugh all the way to the bank after finding gullible people like us.

When there is a search for a marriage proposal, what do people first look at? Always the looks, always the skin. Then there is money, status, family background, etc. I have always heard this from old people whenever there is a marriage, "chedu kashe asaa? sobit asaa gi? gore asaa gi?" (konkani, translated to english, How is the girl? Is she beautiful? Is she fair?).

This surely causes some blood boiling situations for me but I have accepted the inevitable. People say that God has gifted some people beauty so we should appreciate it. Sure, beauty is to be appreciated. But restricting our views on beauty to good looks and skin color just shows how shallow human nature can be. Beauty appears in several forms, not just skin color and looks. But it is much easier to do that than appreciate the real beauty of a person because that takes a little more work.

Now if someone admires a girl because of her beauty, fairness, even I do it (artificially though) because I guess that's the way the world rotates.