The History of Colorism in India: From Dark Gods to White Worship

Skin color. Something that has united us  and divided us for millennia. It's one of   the first things you see when you look at  a person. It defines races, ethnicities,   even individuals. While modern notions around  race and ethnicity are just that—modern—skin  

color has always been relevant. Nowhere is  that more true than in the Indian subcontinent. India is one of the cradles of humanity, a land  of infinite diversity and thousands of years   of traditions. People across the subcontinent  look drastically different, but there's always  

been an idea of India since ancient times.  Despite being of so many different colors,   both outsiders and insiders recognize an idea  of an Indian. Many Indians can tell you how   diverse these colors are, even in their family—the  light-skinned brother, the dark-skinned sister,  

the generic brown dad and mom. All this is fairly  common, but today only one set of shades is really   admired in India—light-skinned ones. And it's  been like this for a while, but not always. For me, I've always been conscious of my skin  color. I was light-skinned for Indians but a bit  

too brown for Americans. More importantly though  was the day I noticed a snow-white splotch on my   knee. It started to spread slowly but surely.  I was then diagnosed with a condition called   Vitiligo, where my own immune system attacks the  melanin in my skin. Each day, I saw what made me  

Indian chip away. It's probably the reason why  I'm so interested in India today. But anyways,   enough about me. This is a tale about us. This is  the story about a people who used to worship black   gods but ended up worshiping white men. This  is the history of colorism in India. [Music]

India first—let's start off with some background.  Why is India so diverse in terms of skin color?   The obvious answer is size and geography. India  is called a subcontinent for a reason. It has   various biomes and climates, leading to people  adapting in different ways, skin color included.  

But we also have to recognize something else.  We have to talk about the peopling of India,   or the various groups that migrated into India  and mixed to make all these different groups   well Indian. Now, this happens everywhere across  the world, especially in ancient times. Migration  

is a norm in human history. Various different  ethnicities, tribes, and groups would migrate   in and out of regions. This is again super  normal. Only in India is this type of stuff   politicized to this degree, and we'll talk about  why later in the video. The reason I'm bringing  

it up now though is because it's important  to understand these variations in skin color. To put it briefly, India has about four or  five different groups, you could say, that have   migrated into India and mixed to make Indians.  Pretty much all Indians are a mix of the first  

three, and some have the fourth and fifth group.  The first group we're talking about is the ancient   ancestral South Indians. Now, I'm saying South  Indian, but that's kind of a misnomer here. It's   not necessarily the best way to describe it, but  that's what scientists describe it as. All Indians  

have this AASI DNA in them. These are some of the  first migrants out of Africa who arrived probably   around 60 to 70,000 years ago, give or take,  and they are the main source of our darker skin. Next are migrants from around Iran. These  people came around 10,000 to 9,000 years  

ago. They were probably a lighter shade of brown  than the AASI people who were already in India,   and these groups started to mix. That's how the  Indus Valley civilization came about. Then come   people from the steppe. This was a continuous  trickle migration from probably around 4,000  

years ago, maybe a bit later. These people  came from Central Asia and had probably the   lightest brown skin we could say. They came in  waves and integrated with the local population. Combine all these three groups, and you start  getting a culture like the Vedic culture. Keep  

in mind this history is still kind of contested;  it's still shifting with multiple theories. Maybe   some groups came earlier, some groups came later.  But the point of this video we're talking about   is this mix of skin colors, so just keep  that in mind. Anyways, all three of these  

groups are in almost every single Indian, I'd say  probably 95% plus if not even more. We are a mix,   and I just want to emphasize every Indian  is indigenous because of this. When it   comes to the ancient beliefs of these people, they  worshiped Indian land, Indian gods, Indian flora,  

Indian fauna. Their holy sites are in India.  This is what indigenous means. So just again,   keep this in mind—we are all a mix, we're just  of different ratios, which usually varies around   region or caste, and we'll talk about this  later too. Just trust me, let's keep going.

In terms of the last two groups, one is the  Austroasiatic people who came from Southeast   Asia, probably around four to three thousand  years ago. These people have a lot of impact   on the tribal population. So you may have heard  of something called Adivasi. Again, this is like  

a misnomer—everyone is Adivasi, everyone has a  mix of some groups that came earlier and some   groups that came later. So this term is kind of  BS, to be honest. Then, around the same time and   definitely a bit after, we had some people coming  from the Tibetan Plateau. That's how we see some  

Indians with some more East Asian features.  These two groups definitely contribute to that. Combine all five of these groups, and you get  crazy diversity, especially in terms of skin   color. This mix of lineages, even within a single  Indian family, kind of explains why you see so  

much variation within families. I know some of you  guys have made fun of your dark brother or sister,   so you know you can't get away from that. Here,  we're going to talk about that. But enough biology   and basically prehistoric history. What did  ancient Indians themselves think about skin color?

We first start with the Vedas. Now, most people  will probably start talking about "Varna" or how   it's equivalent to color or something like  that, but this is kind of a stretch. This   is kind of like another politicization  that we're talking about here. It's not  

exactly how it was. "Varna" is an ancient  word for caste. Now, in some commentaries,   you will see some colors associated with, say,  white for Brahmins, red for Kshatriyas, yellow   for Vaishyas, and black for Shudras. And while  you can say maybe this holds up to skin color,  

you'll start to understand why it does not  as we start going through the scriptures. Color in the Varna is a very special  thing. It is used primarily for symbolism,   and sometimes people kind of misinterpret  this. So you'll hear things like, "Oh,  

people have golden hair or shining red hair,  then golden eyes, golden skin, shining bright   white." This is mostly to do with metaphors  for the Sun or fire. We're generally describing   like a fiery or sunlike aspect to people. Keep in  mind we have geographic descriptors of the Varna,  

and this is all in India, and there aren't that  many blonde people in India as I know. So there's   also symbolism in terms of white being a color  of purity or newness or hope, and then black   being a color of darkness, ignorance, and evil.  Now, sometimes people transpose these into say,  

ethnic groups or something, but let's keep going  and you'll see that doesn't really hold up. Surprisingly enough, in the early Varna, we  don't see that much commentary on skin color   like that. What do I mean by that? Now, let's  go to the Upanishads, which is the end of the  

Varna. The Upanishads are very difficult  to date, but we could say most of them,   if not all, are probably pre-Buddhist, so  at least 700 BC, plus earlier than that,   maybe going into the thousands, maybe  earlier. That's not the point of this  

video—we're talking about skin and not like a  Neutrogena commercial or anything. Although if   you have a good skincare routine, comment in the  description below—I really need to know as well. Anyways, the Upanishads are important because  they describe skin color in a lot of detail and  

for very specific purposes. They give us some  inferences. They tell us about the culture that   we are researching right now. They tell us about  how early Indians thought. Now, I'm going to give   you three very important verses, and this is in  the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad. The first one is,  

"If one wishes to have a fair-skinned son who  can master one Veda and have a full life,   the mantra recommends rice with milk  and ghee." The second verse describes,   "If one wishes to have a brown or tawny son who  will master two Vedas and have a full life,  

the mantra recommends rice with yogurt and ghee."  The last one, and the most important verse,   describes, "If one wishes to have a dark-skinned  son with copper eyes who will master three Vedas   and live a full life, this mantra recommends  rice cooked in water eaten with ghee."

Now, do you get what just happened here? This  is going to be the crux of the entire video.   The verses are in ascending order of merit  or austerity required to get a child. Now,   this last child—the dark-skinned one with  coppery eyes—it's kind of a weird description,  

isn't it? He's a special one. But why  this emphasis on this skin color? Why   is it so special? And does that mean  that the Vedic people actually preferred   a dark-skinned son or dark skin itself?  That is when our journey really begins.

This verse is a reference to Lord Vishnu,   the description of him having dark skin and  red or coppery eyes—probably some type of,   you know, lighter brown eyes. That is considered  the ultimate blessing. Dark skin was not a shame;  

it was a gift in Vedic India.  Ancient Indians revered dark skin. Kali, Vishnu, Rama, Krishna—all these gods are  described as very beautiful, and the scriptures   have super vivid descriptions of their dark  skin. One description you'll frequently hear  

is "Megha shyamam," which references a dark  thundercloud ready to burst with rain. You'll   find this in the Ramayana, in the Bhagavatam,  in the Vishnu Purana, in the Mahabharata,   and various other scriptures. A big source  for this video is the book "Black Avatar" by  

Amit Majmudar. This is an awesome book; it's  in the description. Go ahead and buy it. But   in this book, Amit actually describes something  he calls the three Krishnas in the Mahabharata. Firstly, there's Krishna of divinity—Lord Krishna,  the avatar of Vishnu. The Krishna of beauty,  

or Krishna as Draupadi—the wife of the  Pandavas. She was very dark-skinned and   considered probably the most beautiful woman  in the entire epic. Hence the name Krishna.   Krishna in this sense means black or dark-skinned.  Lastly, there is Krishna of wisdom—Maharishi Vyas,  

whose original name is Krishna Dvaipayana  because he was born on an island and Krishna   because he was very dark-skinned,  again, also an avatar of Vishnu. At this point, you can kind of see that stigma  around dark skin is not an ancient Indian thing.  

Ancient Indians actually liked all skin tones.  Shiva and Parvati are noted for their very   light or white skin—white as camphor, a type of  mineral that's very white. Bam, frequently paired   with Krishna, is also light-skinned. Now, this is  kind of a theme we see with Vishnu and his great  

devotees Shesha, this white multi-headed great  cobra. We'll see this with the sages Nar being   light-skinned and Narayan being dark-skinned.  We see this with Lakshmana being light-skinned   and Rama being dark-skinned. It's kind of  a beautiful juxtaposition or dichotomy that  

we see in Hindu theology, where we have this  light-skinned devotee and dark-skinned god. Of course, we have these goddesses like Radha  or Sita or Lakshmi who are also described as   golden-skinned. Same thing with Lord Buddha,  who's described as very golden-hued. There's  

sometimes variations between descriptions,  especially with the gold and the fair skin   people, but the dark-skinned people are  very prominently dark-skinned. My point   is ancient India had a unique acceptance around  almost all skin tones. I'm sure there was some,  

you know, internal variance between certain  regions and areas and groups and time,   but overall, we see in these scriptures a  wide acceptance of different skin colors. That's unique; that's different from India today.  Nowhere can we see this better than the caves of  

Ajanta. The earliest carvings date around to  around the 2nd century BC and were primarily   used by Buddhist monks and sometimes traders or  travelers as a place of refuge or a monastery.   Over the next hundreds of years, you'd see scenes  of Buddha's life as well as contemporary India  

painted along the walls in these amazing murals.  Something that immediately jumps out when you look   at these paintings—these earliest depictions  of Indians in terms of paint is dark skin.   There's a lot of people who are dark-skinned,  and artists had a wide array of pigments they  

could choose from—minerals or plants or other  types of earth and products. And you can kind   of see this across the paintings as well—there are  light-skinned depictions, dark-skinned depictions,   everything in between. So you see a whole  range, but you see a lot of dark skin.

And look, Indians are primarily dark-skinned,  especially around that area in Maharashtra,   so they were painting themselves as they  were—they chose to go black. But eventually,   they did kind of go back, but we'll discuss  that in a little bit. Ajanta is the most famous,  

but we also see similar depictions  in the Ellora caves in Maharashtra,   the Bagh caves in Madhya Pradesh, the  Sittannavasal cave in Tamil Nadu—all   these date to around the 5th or the 7th century  AD and they're in different parts of India. So we  

could kind of see a snapshot of how Indians  viewed themselves. So what exactly changed? Well, most people skip around a thousand  years at this point, if not more,   and go directly to British colonialism. But  we're going to be a bit naughty—we're going  

to wade into controversy and something we're  not supposed to talk about. We're going to   discuss the truth in seven parts. We see  the first Islamic invasions into India,   and that is the Arab invasion of Sindh. Now,  this isn't that significant territory-wise.  

The Arabs would be promptly stopped thereafter,  and their expansion into India would kind of be   moot. We wouldn't see further invasions  from Muslims until much, much later. The reason I bring up the Arab invasion though  is because this is kind of the first interaction  

of the Islamic world with the Indian world. We  start to see Arab merchants and travelers going   into India more, so you'd see this in Arab writing  about Indians in kind of a backhanded compliment   type of way, even though they're pretty effusive  in terms of praise early on. What do I mean by  

this? Well, early Arab visitors, merchants,  or traders would praise Indians for their   wisdom and their knowledge, but they were kind of  surprised that these people were so dark-skinned   and knowledgeable. Remember, Arabs practiced  a slave trade that was connected to Africa,  

so they kind of had a negative connotation  when it came to dark skin. And to be fair,   people in the ancient world did have  stigmas around skin color. India may   have been a bit exceptional here, but other  regions did seem to have this type of stigma.

And, you know, it's the ancient world—we don't  need to be picky here. They believe what they   believe, and that was then. But again, the reason  I bring this up is because since Arab culture was   the pinnacle of Islamic culture, this dark skin  stigma would start to spread or reinforce in some  

cases. And reinforcement is probably the more  important way to describe it when it comes to   India. That is because this skin color stigma,  this association with dark skin being bad,   spread more so because of the Turkic invasions  into India around the 10th century AD. This is  

when we'd see some of the first most  prominent ones with Mahmud of Ghazni. Now,   he would come down and sack Somat multiple  times as well as other areas in India,   but he wouldn't really make that much of a base  in India—it was a bit more temporary. Same thing  

with a few later invaders until the Delhi  Sultanate and eventually the Mughal Empire. Now, these Central Asian Turks themselves  would be light-skinned, but they also had   another cultural attachment—they were attached  to Persian culture, and in Persian culture,  

light skin is a huge thing; it is a beauty  standard. So they combined all these sources   of dark skin stigma—whether it's the Arab  Islamic one, the Central Asian Turk one,   or the Iranian Persian one—and they would despise  dark skin. They despised these Hindus and these  

Indians that they would conquer. They thought  dark skin was ugly, and this is where we see   kind of a slow-motion cultural imposition start  happening within India, especially the areas that   they conquered. Add to the fact that a new slave  trade also opened up—dark-skinned Indians would  

be carried off into Central Asia and other  parts of the Islamic world for slave work. Arabs associate dark skin with slavery  due to the connection with Africa. Now,   it was the turn of Turks and Persians  to associate more sunskin with slavery.  

Even the beloved poet Rumi, who isn't just  popular today but was also popular back then,   had a lot of poetry criticizing dark skin and  associating the word "Hindu" with slavery or   dark skin or arrogance or ignorance. And  all these very negative connotations—this  

combination of Hindu, dark skin, slavery—that  is what the Islamic world started to think of   Hindus. It went away from this earlier Arab idea  of men of wisdom to becoming men of slavery. Rumi wrote Persian poetry, and Persian was  a lingua franca of the Indian Muslim elites.  

So you start to see this dark-skinned stigma  spreading not only across the Islamic world in   the west but also within India in the east. And  this also started to rub off onto Hindu elites   who were working with these Muslim kingdoms. When  you start to see art coming out of Islamic India,  

you notice that skin is starting to get a  lot lighter. The dark-skinned people are   being dropped—they're absent. They just  stop existing in many cases. And again,   this would leak into Hindu artists as well. They  were part of the same elite culture in many cases,  

so they would be patronized to paint  light-skinned. And this is how Indians   started to see themselves a bit differently.  This is when the shame starts kicking in. But beyond art, we have to start looking at the  real world as well. How did the Delhi Sultanate  

organize their empire, and what kind of hierarchy  did they have when it comes to their upper   echelons? The historian Minhaj-hu Saraj notes  that the nobles and servants of the state were   all Turks of pure origin and Tajik of good stock.  Even converted Indian Muslims would face a glass  

ceiling in the Delhi Sultanate administration  simply because of their ancestry, simply because   of their skin color. Even later Muslim empires  like the Mughal or the Bahmani would import   Turks or Persians or just Muslims from the West  into their administration, as they highly valued  

these people simply because of their lineage—they  were not Indian because they were light-skinned. Now, think of the social effect of this.  All the people at the top are light-skinned,   and all of the people below them are progressively  getting darker and darker. What does this do to a  

person's psychology? What does this do  to a society's psychology when you see   this? This foreign elite idea of lighter skin  being better starts to percolate across India   over these hundreds of years of Islamic rule.  However, we have evidence that this obsession  

is not that widespread, and that's because  Islamic empires didn't conquer all of India. Marco Polo, a famous medieval European  traveler, actually traveled up and down the   west coast of India from Kerala to Maharashtra  to Gujarat. Something he noticed and was kind  

of perplexed by was that the people liked  dark skin. They tried to get darker skin,   and their gods were black, as he described  it. On the other hand, they saw white skin   as kind of like a devilish quality, while  dark skin was seen as a godly quality.

Even when you zoom out during this time period,  this was the age of the Bhakti movement. And who   were some of the biggest gods that this movement  was centered around? Of course, Rama, Krishna,   and Vishnu—the dark lords of India. An explosion  of poetry came out praising Rama and Krishna's  

thundercloud dark skin that was reminiscent  of a blue lotus or deep blue ocean. The icon   dark blue skin starts to arise. Here, on one  hand, this might be because attitudes started   to shift around really dark skin, and people  didn't like it. That definitely might be true,  

but the symbolic angle is also here. Either way,  one can kind of see this as a societal pushback   against this new beauty ideal—the embrace of  dark skin over this new imposition of light skin. But anyways, back to the Europeans. Marco Polo was  only one of many European travelers and explorers,  

missionaries and merchants who started to trickle  into India at this point. Over a thousand years   earlier, the Greeks came to conquer India,  but they couldn't really cut it. Rather,   it was time for trade, both in goods  as well as information. In terms of  

descriptions of how they looked, they said  the North Indians looked like Egyptians,   and the South Indians looked like Ethiopians.  They just didn't have woolly hair—their words,   not mine. And this early European  contact with these Greeks and even  

some Romans was fairly positive because of  this exchange of ideas as well as riches. But as time went on, and especially after the  Middle Ages and into the age of exploration   and colonialism, things started to change.

While India's Turk conquerors were into light  skin, Europeans were another level. Much more   concrete ideas began to emerge around the ideas  of race and the differences between people. Some   of the earliest of this rhetoric that we hear  is actually from the Portuguese. We have a lot  

of accounts of Portuguese rule in places like  Goa and especially of the Inquisition, when   locals were forced to convert to Christianity,  as well as the descriptions of these locals. Francis Xavier, a missionary who advocated for  this brutal Inquisition, notes how he detested  

the blackness of the Hindus, and he kind of  gloated about their black idols being destroyed.   This guy probably has over 100 institutes and  schools named after him in India today. Now,   while the British didn't really have as much  religious motivation when they came to India,  

it was mostly commercial and trade and  eventually conquest. They shared the disdain   for dark skin with the Portuguese. And again,  I don't want to judge people based on modern   standards—people back then were racist, like  let's be honest—but I do want to give you the  

context of how these European colonialists  came to India and how they viewed Indians,   especially them being considered  less than because of their dark skin. Think of how often you hear the word "fair" in  English literature as a sign of beauty. Now, other  

global literature also has descriptions about  maybe light-skinned being better or a certain   skin being better, whatever. But this almost  single-minded obsession within British literature   about fair being good gives us a clue into the  mentality of a lot of these colonialists. And as  

the British conquered India after commercializing  it, colonialism came into full effect. Not only   were Indian markets and industries destroyed by  the parasitic effect of colonialism, but also   Indian self-conception. The East India Company and  the British Crown ran British India with a network  

of Indians. These Indians would work under British  officers and imbibe British values. This idea of   dark skin being bad again—we have another set of  elite Indians imbibing this. After the earlier   Islamic empires and elite attitudes eventually  reign down, there is a trickle-down effect here in  

terms of culture. So this is how we start seeing  a greater and greater idea of dark skin being bad. Another aspect you have to consider is the British  obsession with race and anthropology and how it   would be integrated when it came to studying  India. The British were very detail-oriented  

people and super systematic—whether used for  good or bad, this is what the British were. And   they were super efficient when it came to this.  This meant they would start noticing details in   people that even the people may not notice. The  British recorded the differences in skin color  

between castes, differences in their demeanor,  the differences in how they carried their life,   and they would craft theories such as the Martial  Race Theory or the Aryan Invasion Theory. Remember   those migrations I described earlier in the  video? Those types of migrations again, they  

happen all across the world, but now we started  to see a politicization of it and a racialization   of it from the British. And it is true that  castes are kind of distinct ethnic groups,   even in terms of their genetics. But while they  have differing ratios, they all come from the  

same sources in most cases. Not just that, but  this isn't all that salient—you can't necessarily   tell someone's caste by their skin color or vice  versa. Maybe you could tell what region they're   from, even then it's kind of difficult at times.  Nonetheless, this type of racialization has really  

caught on in certain parts of India, especially  a place like Dadu with the Derine movement. Even nowadays, there's these ideas about  indigeneity where certain castes are more   indigenous than others, and measuring like  genetic percentages and stuff like that. And  

this type of stuff is almost always just used for  hatred. Let's just be honest, that's what it is.   This probably isn't the best path for Indians to  go on—dividing themselves by color and genetics   and race and whatever group mix you are. I don't  think it's good, but that's personally just me.

Either way, back to the British. Thomas Macaulay,  a leader in the British administration of India,   created this "brown Englishman" concept where  he wanted to craft a group of Indians who were   Indian in blood and color but English in tastes,  opinions, morals, and intellect. The British not  

only physically conquered and destroyed India,  but they also did it mentally. They picked apart   Indian institutions and replaced them with  their own. Will Durant, possibly the most   accomplished American historian ever, notes that  when the British came, there was throughout India  

a system of communal schools managed by village  communities. The agents of the East India Company   destroyed these village communities and took  no steps to replace the schools. Even today,   after a century of effort to restore them,  they stand at 66% of their original number.  

One hundred years ago, there were now 730,000  villages and only 162,000 primary schools. Only   7% of the boys and 1.5% of the girls receive  schooling, i.e., 4% of the whole. Such schools   that the government has established are not free  but exact a tuition fee which, though small to  

a western purse, means large to a family always  hovering on the edge of starvation. Mass Indian   education basically ceased, while elite Indian  education was controlled by the British. As elite   Indians began to consume more British education,  literature, and ideas, Macaulay's words came  

true. We started to see brown Englishmen,  but later many of these brown Englishmen   would rebel and fight for freedom. However,  their biases remained. All these ideas about   Indian inferiority and shame would stay in these  people despite fighting for freedom. There was  

a sense of deep shame here—a shame around Indian  religion, culture, values, and indeed skin color. As the Indian Republic was born and India  became one, these elite ideas would now   start to supercharge and accelerate across all  of India. Many of the first producers of early  

Bollywood actually came from Northwest India,  a lot of Punjabis especially. And most of these   people were light-skinned and/or into this brown  Englishman type of concept. An obsessive amount   of effort actually went into making these  light-skinned Indians even lighter with,  

say, lighting or makeup. This standard of beauty  would then spread across India as Indians went   and still do kind of go crazy for films. But a  consequence of this is that the Indian masses   actually started to hate themselves and their skin  color. They didn't look like the people on screen,  

and this isn't just about facial features or  anything—it is about, again, their skin color. One interesting manifestation of this in the  Republic of India's history is secessionist   separatist movements in places like Kashmir,  Punjab, or Northeast India. A lot of their  

foundational thought about why they are  separate is related to their light skin,   their whiteness. While they'll speak  about freedom and human rights in the   English language, when they switch to  local, a lot of it is just talking crap  

about Indians because of their dark skin  and how much better they are than other   Indians because of their lighter skin.  The colorism and ethnic supremacy angle   of the separatist movements is integral—it  is foundational. Their separatism ultimately  

rests on the fact that they don't like being  considered Indian. They don't like dark skin. Now, attitudes around skin color still persist  in India, even though I do think it's gotten   better today than in the past. Images of gods and  goddesses, especially in terms of acting roles,  

rarely feature this type of dark skin that's  described in the past. This Meghashyam—we   usually see actors with lighter or white tones at  most. I think this is starting to change. Though   India is undergoing a massive transformation  and how it views itself—its self-conception,  

as we talked about—there is an idea of India  throwing away this 1,000 years of humiliation or   shame or slavery and embracing what it actually  is: embracing its ancient roots and embracing   its indigeneity. There's a pride in being Indian  that's different than it was in the recent past.  

Some may call it nationalism, some may call  it patriotism, some may call it indigenous   rights—whatever you want to call it, Indians are  changing how they view themselves, and it's mostly   in a positive direction. Indians are beginning  to look themselves in the mirror and not look  

away in shame, rather embracing who and what they  are. This is a new India on the horizon, and it's   filled with new Indians—proud, unapologetic,  and aspiring. And honestly, I don't think this   change is simply skin-deep. And like I told you  before, once you go black, you don't go back.

Thanks, everyone, for watching. This is  Akshar from The Emissary. I tried some new   editing techniques in this video and maybe a bit  cooler lighting than I used to do, but do tell me   what you thought about the video. Make sure you  comment. I love when you guys give me questions.  

I try to reply to almost every single one, so  don't be shy to share your thoughts. I love it   when you guys do that, and it's also really good  for the algorithm. Speaking of, do like, share,   subscribe—everything I'm supposed to say. I want  to really get this channel going. I want to start  

publishing more, I want to make better quality,  more quantity, and really just give a different   take on India than what you may usually hear.  Anyways, thanks again, everyone. Have a good one.