<b>Geetanjali Krishna:</b> The weighty issue of body imaging

Is it me, or are people obsessing over body image more than ever before? Social media is full of pictures of perfect people while a new feminist campaign is urging moms to get their imperfect bodies into swimsuits and reclaim the beach. All this, and a conversation with Meena, a masseuse from Bharatpur, Rajasthan, made me realise that what might be considered beautiful by some, might be quite undesirable for others.

Being the first time that I was being pummelled by Meena, I thought I'd break the ice by asking her about her clients. She immediately named some prominent Page 3 personalities - some of whom even I had heard of. She'd just massaged one of then, she said, before coming to me. "Did you know," she said, "that client is so thin that I used to feel sorry for her, thinking she was sick?" That was before she learned that the client spent a lot of time and money to look like that. "When I massage her, all I can feel is bones under her skin," she said. "Why would anyone want to look like that?"
 

Coming from a long line of barbers and masseuses, Meena said that back home, she could easily tell the caste of her clients from their body type. "If she's fair and plump, there's a good chance she is Brahmin," she said. "Rajputs tend to be leaner with longer limbs, but they never look undernourished."

In her village, located in one of India's poorest and least developed regions, plumpness is a highly desirable attribute. "It shows your family is prosperous and that you have no need to perform heavy physical labour," she said. But when Meena moved to Delhi 15 years ago, she found it impossible to neatly slot her urban, westernised clients on the basis of the shape of their bodies. "The more fashionable they are, the harder they try to erase every womanly curve," she observed. "I wonder what people back home in my village will make of my fancy Delhi clients," she giggled.

Predictably, this obsession with being thin was quite a culture shock for Meena, coming from a community where soft plumpness was carefully nurtured. She bemoaned her own thinness, saying that malnutrition in childhood had made it impossible for her to gain weight in adulthood. "I couldn't for the life of me fathom why they wanted to be thin, and then thinner," she said. Over time, she learnt to appreciate these new standards of beauty a little. "Now if I find that a client has lost some more weight, I just say she's looking fitter," she said with a smile.

Yet, she said after having massaged me to a state of acute drowsiness, she still found this urban obsession with being thin hard to understand. "Having grown up in abject poverty in my village, I find it ironic that these ladies, who can afford to eat as much of the best food in the world, live on salad leaves and lemon water," she said. Their diet seemed as poor as hers had been when she was growing up in her village. "As a child, I used to greedily watch my father and brother eating dal and vegetables, leaving nothing for us seven sisters. Our mother would quickly forage for some mustard leaves from the fields, and boil them in water for us."

After she left, I was amused to find a recipe for a kale smoothie to hasten weight loss on my Facebook wall. Rural poverty and urban obsession with body image may be otherwise poles apart, but both seem to compel women to drink vile green stuff… and lose weight too.