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Barbie Who?
The Statesman|August 11, 2023
Full disclosure. I have not seen the movie. And I have never owned the doll.
- VINATI SUKHDEV
Barbie Who?

In my mind, that makes me eminently qualified to write about a plaything that most women beyond the Anglo-Saxon world do not recognise or care about.

And yet as Greta Gerwig’s movie crosses the $1 billion mark at the box office in just two weeks (biggest opening for a woman director, biggest opening weekend of 2023), I cannot but dip my sensible flat shoe (not pink) into the bubbling pool of opinion that spans ardent worship and cynical dissent.

Growing up in pre-liberalised India, I spent my childhood with my face flattened on a shop window full of delights that I could never have. I had to make do with toys available in the local market: mostly clunky wooden educational aids like an abacus to improve my math or badly stitched stuffed dolls that would lose eyes and arms with alarming regularity; perhaps a subliminal nudge towards a career in medicine.

There was only one girl in my class of 40 who was lucky enough to have a father who travelled abroad and she owned two Barbies. I remember marvelling at Barbie’s luminous golden hair, her impossibly slim body, her fashionable clothes and shoes and feeling a sense of adulation. I could never be her. I looked nothing like her. She belonged to a different world, one that I had never seen.

This story is from the August 11, 2023 edition of The Statesman.

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This story is from the August 11, 2023 edition of The Statesman.

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