Racism doesn’t only come with the colour black! And it’s absolutely bizarre to even understand what society really wants one to look like; fair, dark, tanned? tall, short; but whatever it is, there will be this one mass of people around you trying to chain you down on the basis of how you look! While we have seen countless men and women getting trolled for having a dusky complexion, Sanaya Irani, the Miley Jab Hum Tum actress used to get bullied for being ‘very fair’; and used to get called a ‘white cockroach’.
When she appeared on Zoom’s By Invite only, she said, “When I was in a boarding school in Ooty… I am really fair, if everybody has noticed, and I was ten times fairer then. I was looked at differently in that school. People looked at me and said ‘white cockroach’ or ‘lizard’.”
She further said, “I heard a Gujarati family once say, ‘She looks like a monkey’. They were saying it in Gujarati but I knew Gujarati, they didn’t know that. We were in school, eating ice cream and they were like ‘look at her’ because I had red cheeks, red nose, all of that. They were like, ‘She looks like a monkey.’ So, for me, when people looked at me, I always connected it to ‘they are going to say something weird about me’,” as quoted by Hindustan Times.