Last week, Dhanesh was teaching his little brother to play chess game.
It's always nice to silently watch kids as they are busy in their world. They have a different perspective of each and every thing. As he finished about describing various coins from the king to pawns, I was thinking he would start describing about the movement and wondering, if Deepak will be able to understand the various movement. To my surprise, he started to talk " The white coins are good and black coins are bad. So when you are playing chess, Take the white coins and we should play in a way that white wins as they are the good coins". When Dhanesh, plays chess, he always prefer white. I thought , he prefers as the white makes the first move, but now I realize ,I had misunderstood.
I had then to break through their conversation to tell him that, there is nothing like good or bad based on the color of coins. We can opt any color and we should focus on winning. I then asked, who told him that white is good and black is bad. He immediately replied, "Recently you took us to Bahubali movie and In the fight between two groups, white people won and the black and ugly group lost the battle".
Well, imagining the real fight in chess board, I could not answer him immediately. In the movie, they introduced a new language composed of hundred words for the group, as people will fight for degrading their mother tongue, but none of the dark skin people fight against for showing dark skin people as bad.
Before I started to speak he continued again, "That's how it is shown every where mom. In school annual day function also, you saw right. In the play , there was good angel and a witch who was wearing all black coat, black hat etc. There was a dance by the bad witches and they were all angry and face full painted with black powder. So black is bad right ?"
I had then explained him that, it was shown in the play for you to differentiate easily. If both of them wear same dress and make up, you will not be able identify who is good and bad. Since you are not supposed to pick up bad things, it is shown in unlikely makeup. So in chess game, it is not that white is good and black is bad. The rule of the game is the light coin start the game. Even you start the game with black coin as second move, you can win the game if you make your moves carefully. I also added him that, In real life also it is not that dark skin people are bad.
There are people, who ask if the baby is looking good (in terms of skin color) on hearing birth of a baby, even I have seen people who say "aiyee... karuppu (disgusting...black)" on seeing a new born baby for the first time. The child listen to the sound from the womb before its born, but they speak like this in front of baby? That's how the child grows, hearing all sorts of criticism.
At least in past generation, they had dark skin hero and comedians (Important: not the heroine...), but now, most of Tamil movies, all are shown as fair skinned, including the villain, the only good cause, as it changes the point that the villain is always black.
It is not the fact that dark skin people are out of the big or small screens. They do exists, but they want to hide the real skin tone and appear brighter on the screen. one good example is the super star who transformed himself in movies like that.
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Those days movies ran well, despite the skin tone of the actors. People thought themselves inferior by their skin color and want to change now. Good time for the cosmetic industry, beauty clinic and aesthetic dermatology.
As the title of this post says... It's the first spoiling 'C' - Color. I shall talk about the other two in another post.
-- Dhanesh Amma
