For sheer hypocrisy and two-facedness, the English are hard to beat. And to all intents and purposes, compradors vending their goods in this country seem to have learned their lessons well.

Take for example, the latest ad campaign for Dove soap manufactured and marketed by Hindustan Unilever, the India subsidiary of the London/Amsterdam FMCG (fast moving consumer goods) multinational Unilever plc (annual revenue: €50.7 billion or Rs.436,020 crore). This trendy, politically correct ad campaign exhorts women of India to acknowledge and celebrate their rich and varying diversity and skin tones and refrain from taking “the beauty test”, i.e, ignore standards of pulchritude set by society and media and the entertainment industry. It recounts stories of women and girls who have suffered ridicule and contempt for being too fat, dark, thin, tall, whatever, and advises them to glory in and celebrate their unique identities. Excellent, incontestible advice. Who can possibly dispute it?

But wait a minute. Until recently, wasn’t Dove toilet soap being advertised as the magic formula for reprehensibly dark non-caucasian women to transform into lily white? And wasn’t it the Indian compradors of Unilever Red Devils in London and Amsterdam who had been advertising a faux skin-lightening potion branded Fair & Lovely for decades, which gave the world’s most beautiful, multi-hued women a massive inferiority complex?

Now after inflicting huge psychological damage upon India’s citizenry and brain-washing them to accept florid visages and milk-bottle legs as standards of beauty, the belated hand-wringing compradors of Hindustan Unilever (who have blacklisted this publication for consistently criticising Fair & Lovely) have become cloyingly politically correct. Fair & Lovely has been re-branded Glow & Lovely, and Dove and Lux have become colour neutral.

Clearly this belated hand-wringing is all to the good. But a public mea culpa is necessary.

Also read: Shattering stereotypes