These two weeks I am spending on soaking India, its milieu and the changes. Will be back with a substantive discussion in the week after next. When you analyze the last 60 years of the economic miracles of Singapore, South Korea and Malaysia versus the continued impoverished Indian economy, you get very interesting lessons. Can Indians have the wherewithal in them to do in one generation so that the coming generations may rise? Over ambitious politicians joined hands with Religious institutions and groups to defeat BJP only because it was characterized as a "Hindu Party".
It was won on Minority Vote where Hindus were rendered irrelevant. That is the greatest lesson from this election! Lipsticks of all colors are commonplace these days. No one cares when someone wears it on her. But not so long ago there was a time when wearing of lipstick signaled the wearer was a prostitute!
In fact, in , British law was proposed in the Parliament that would annul a marriage if the woman wore cosmetics β especially lipstick β before her wedding day. The British Parliament had had its rendezvous with lipsticks earlier in as well when a bill was proposed to ban the wearing of lipstick.
In Greece, a woman who wore red lipstick was considered a prostitute. It was a highly toxic combination which often led to serious illnesses and also death. In Mesopotamia, women and even men used crushed semi-precious stones to paint their lips. Cleopatra used the crushed beetles and ants to find the right scarlet shade for her lips!
In Europe, specially during the Dark Ages, the mores on lipsticks were largely controlled by the Church. It was only with Queen Elizabeth 1 , that lipstick made a brief comeback in the popular parlance. Around the end of the 19th century, Guerlain, a French cosmetic company, began to make lipstick on an industrial scale.
