It took me a while to figure it out, but I did – brown is beautiful! And I'm not talking brown chocolate icing on a brown chocolate cake, but the color of my skin. The realization didn't come easily. It took a move to a foreign country and a whole different look at skin colors to drive the point home. After all, I spent the better part of my life being told repeatedly by innumerable 'aunties' that unless I scrubbed, coated, smothered, and cajoled my skin into being 'fair', I had very little chance of catching myself a suitable husband, which, of course, was the sole aim of my existence.

Growing up in a small town in India, I was acutely aware that the lighter your skin, the more beautiful you were considered to be, especially if you were a girl. Well, also if you were a boy. My two brothers were often compared by several of the neighborhood 'aunties' – "The older one has more brains, but the younger one is gora (light-skinned)" – in a wistful tone that implied that the older one might have done a lot better with his brains had he also been born with the right skin tone. For a number of years, the expression "tall, dark, and handsome" puzzled me because I associated the 'dark' with skin color rather than hair color and couldn't reconcile the expression's apparent benevolence to the dark-skinned with the reality I saw and heard on a daily basis.

My high school days were liberally sprinkled with reproachful remarks from all quarters because I spent too much time playing unladylike games in the sun and acquired an almost permanent tan. My well-meaning mother encouraged me to try out the 'fairness creams' we saw promoted on TV that guaranteed sublimely light skin in 4-6 weeks. Of course, I could barely keep up the apply-generously-twice-a-day regimen for 4 days, so eventually my well-wishers gave up on me and I was allowed to keep my unsightly tan.

The efforts of my fellow women to fight the blight of dark skin fascinated me. Girls subjected their skins to multitudes of home remedies and potions in order to ensure that, along with a college degree, they also graduated with the right matrimonial prospect. It bothered me to see that women propagated this idea of light skin being the short-cut to heaven by trying to conform to and judging others by that standard of beauty.

With all this color-related baggage, when my husband (yes, I have one in spite of my lack of effort on the skin-care front) and I moved to the US in December 2001 I was astonished by the implications my skin color had. On one hand, it made me stand out as being different and distinctly foreign in the post 9/11 USA. On the other hand, for the first time in my life I did not feel the pressure to lighten my skin by artificial means. No matter how light my skin got, I would always be "brown" in the U.S.!

But what surprised me the most was the realization that many Caucasians put in a whole lot of effort into getting their skin to look like mine. Rows of people line the beaches in minimal clothing, numerous tanning products line store shelves, people spend their hard-earned money to squeeze themselves into tanning beds that hold the promise of turning their skins to bronze. Wow. The grass really is greener on the other side, I repeatedly told my Caucasian friends. They stared uncomprehendingly at me while I tried to explain to them why an Indian woman would never pay for a tan.

And it was in the midst of one of these conversations as I stood looking around at my eclectic group of friends, all different colors, sizes, and shapes and every one of them equally dear to me, that the realization hit me – it didn't matter! Every one of my friends was beautiful – and it had everything to do with who they were and how they lived their lives and nothing to do with the color of their skin. Their attitudes and their laughter made them a lot more attractive than anything that came out of a bottle ever could.

I spent the next few days in the euphoria of having found the truth about skin color. Then, a friend from India sent me some pictures of his newborn daughter. As I excitedly shared the pictures with family, an aunt shook her head sympathetically. "The poor baby – she has her father's dark complexion, not her mother's light skin."

I see now that the epiphany I had that summer evening is a well-kept secret. In fact, it is even more obscure than a secret because it is far more difficult to spread – secrets are easy enough to leak into the public domain. It is sad that even those of us who have had the chance to interact with people of different cultures and nationalities find it hard to break out of this cycle of judgment based on skin color. If we Indians continue to discriminate against our own on the basis of skin color, what right do we have to expect others to see past it?

All babies are pure and deserve a chance to grow up feeling good about themselves. Life would be a lot better if we could recognize that every one of us, in every shade of brown, is beautiful.