by Reena Daruwalla, guest writer for Nancy Hayssen.com

In recent times, there’s been a lot of column inches and TV minutes devoted to the newly thin Kareena Kapoor, one of India’s top actors. Apparently she decided she wanted to be uber slim for her action role in the movie Tashan, and she has been at pains to tell everyone that it was yoga (and nothing extreme or surgical) that was behind her ‘transformation’. Her journey to size zero has been rather too well documented by the media.

In the midst of all this hype, the Times of India (Sunday Supplement) did a write up on how “real women are back!” It was a refreshing change. The article goes on to talk about Chloe Marshall and Whitney Thompson who are breaking down the ‘thin model’ stereo type and about whether, finally the West is letting go of its obsession with size zero and if “the West developed a genuine fondness for curves” The write up quotes US-based Indian model Riya Ray as saying, “Lots of models are making it big with their plus size.”

“Right now, the glamour world is on a mission to break the myth of ‘flesh equals failure’. Says model Meyhar Bhasin, “Skinny women look like hangers on the ramp every fashion week, they look starved and unpretty. You can’t even recall their names. They don’t have any charisma.””

The article then goes on to talk about Nancy, and about her controversial ad campaign where she posed nude and about her message, that you can be beautiful (and sexy) at any size.

I think the West can take some pointers from India here, because I feel that Indians do not share the low fat tolerance threshold that people in the west seem to have. Beauty in India has hitherto been synonymous with ‘voluptuous’ and ‘curvy’ but having said that I feel that recently some of the western malaise has crept into our psyche as well. Rather unfortunately, there is a similar stereotype of thin=healthy or thin=beautiful that is being rammed down our throats by an increasingly consumerist society and the fat loss industry that has much to gain from perpetuating this myth.

Perhaps though we can learn something from western societies where eating disorders such as Anorexia and Bulimia are rampant and nip this in the bud, before it grows into a full scale epidemic!