Just like Dove aired those inane mini-soap operas starring Alicia Keys earlier this year, another brand owned by Unilever, Pond's, is airing soap opera-esque commercials to promote products in India. But unlike those boring Keys spots, the Pond's ads, for a product called White Beauty, have sparked major protests.

White Beauty is certainly not the first skin lightening product with commercial that shocks us westerners, but the premise of the three-part soap opera ad — a man leaves a darker-skinned woman for a fair-skinned woman, causing the former girlfriend to lighten her skin to win him back — has a lot of people talking about color complexes in India. It helps that the three actors in the ads are big Bollywood stars.

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A memo from Barack Obama's campaign leaked to the press last week pokes fun at Hillary Clinton's ties to India and has Obama scrambling to apologize to the Indian American community.

The memo, headlined, "Hillary Clinton (D-Punjab)'s Personal Financial and Political Ties to India," was prepared by Obama's opposition research department and distributed to reporters last week in exchange for a promise that they not reveal where it came from, a common practice by campaigns. The memo documented relationships between Indian Americans and Clinton, and noted that her husband, former President Clinton, had accepted speaking fees from Cisco, a firm that has been criticized for moving U.S. jobs to India. It noted Sen. Clinton's ties to a consulting firm that assists U.S. companies in moving jobs to India and other countries.

Indian Americans are upset because the implication is that having Indian supporters or close ties to the community is somehow a bad thing. I wonder if they'll forgive him. I mean, it's not like he made a joke about Ghandi working for a gas station or something.

[LAT]

Here's an advertisement for a skin-whitening product only Michael Jackson, and apparently millions of Indians, could love. Lesson learned — when your skin is dark, you're a loser. When you lighten it with Fair & Lovely, you will be red carpet-ready.

It's bittersweet to be reminded that there are cultures with even deeper color complexes than ours.