Indians are as racist as anyone in the world. However, this is more at an individual level -- typically manifested as 'Match required for 5"4, fair, GSB, chartered accountant'.

But in professional sectors one rarely finds overt racism, and I can think of only three industries where it occurs -- films, modelling and airlines. I always thought that the films and modelling industries were the more racist of them all, but I have changed my mind of late. The airline industry beats them hollow.

There are dark skinned actors of both sexes in the film industries all over the country. Amitabh Bachchan, Nana Patekar, Bipasha Basu in Hindi, Rajnikanth and Vijay in Tamil and Shivraj Kumar, Puneet Rajkumar and Upendra in Kannada.

I am not familiar with the film fraternity in other languages, but I am sure they have dark skinned people there too. One will even find the odd dark skinned model, mostly in advertisements for things like pearl necklaces (because the object being sold requires a contrasting skin colour).

On the other hand, I don't remember the last time that I saw a dark skinned member of the cabin crew in an airline. On some of the newer airlines, members of the cabin crew are amongst the most fair skinned people that you will find anywhere in India.

Given half a chance these airlines would probably recruit Caucasians, and maybe the only reason they don't is because they cost a lot of money.

If you took a census of skin colours across the country, you would get various shades of brown with the majority colour being chocolate brown. The mix of skin colours however is not reflected in the airline industry.

Obviously, the premise here is that fair is good for the airline's image and dark is not.

If you are traveling by plane in India and your skin colour falls anywhere other than in the 'fairest of fair' category, you may be treated as a second class citizen, even if you are paying through your nose to travel executive class.

The ability angle

A flight attendant performs two roles -- safety and service. The service role requires the person to be caring and considerate, while the safety role requires the person to exhibit quick thinking and be commanding and authoritative.

Because of the high levels of safety achieved in flying over the years, the safety role is only occasionally performed. However, flying was, is and always will be risky business. A member of the cabin crew must always be mentally prepared for an emergency situation. The skills required relate to aircraft evacuation, ditching (landing on water), decompression, fire fighting, passenger management, security related issues and first aid.

Therefore, a flight attendant must normally be caring, and if the situation arises, be able to recollect appropriate procedures and be authoritative enough to implement them or get passengers to implement them. This is quite a tall order and requires a personality and a brain that is out of the ordinary in many ways.

In the armed forces, people in the front line face a war situation maybe once in a decade. But just because a war occurs once in 10 years one cannot become complacent and recruit sub-standard soldiers; nor cease to ensure that they are in fighting fit condition all the time.

Soldiers are always recruited for specific mental and physical abilities and go through a constant training process even in times of peace, in readiness to face a war. Soldiers are not selected for their looks.

Cabin crew too similarly need to be recruited for specific mental qualities and must be ready to face an emergency situation at any time. When recruiting people if you first filter down to people who are 'whiter than the whitest', you reduce your pool of available recruits to maybe 1% of the total.

Assuming that the mental qualities required are equally distributed among people of all skin colours, this means you have in this process filtered out 99% of the people most suited for the job in terms of required mental qualities. Unfortunately, this is exactly what happens when airlines recruit people.

Imagine being in an emergency situation in a plane in which the flight attendants' brains have frozen and they have forgotten the correct procedure to be followed (if they knew it at all in the first place).

Given a choice, how many of us would fly in a plane that has cabin crew chosen for their looks or skin colour instead of intelligence and skills?

DGCA license for cabin crew?

Pilots are required to have a license from the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA), which among other things requires a minimum number of flying hours and clearing of examinations in the theoretical and practical aspects of flying a plane.

Currently, the selection process for cabin crew, in most if not all airlines, consists of group discussions and interviews to test 'communication, grooming and posture', with presumably a preliminary filtering for skin colour.

Maybe it is time to insist on a DGCA license for cabin crew too, before there is a serious accident caused by an airline totally ignoring the 'safety' aspect of the job of cabin crew.

Remember Neerja Bhanot?

Neerja Bhanot was the senior purser in charge of the 12-member crew on Pan Am Flight 73 on September 6, 1986 between Mumbai and New York. The flight was taken over on the ground by 4 Palestinians on a stopover at Karachi.

The pilots escaped through the cockpit windows, after being warned through interphone by Neerja. This left the Boeing 747 without pilots and Neerja (just 23 years old) and the other young flight attendants in charge of the violent situation.

After 17 hours the power in the aircraft went off. The terrorists panicked and opened random gunfire in the cabin trying to kill as many people as possible, and also threw hand grenades. Neerja and some other flight attendants opened emergency exits and deployed evacuation slides, leading many passengers to safety.

She could have been the first to exit down a slide, but chose to stay back and ensure that the passengers got out safely first. The hijackers attacked her as she tried to shield three children from bullets. She later died of the gunshot wounds.

Unfortunately, 20 passengers were killed, but if not for Neerja, all the 380 other passengers would have died too. Neerja was posthumously awarded the Ashoka Chakra, India's highest civilian award for bravery.

May 2005: Theresa Stewart, 52, told an anti-discrimination tribunal in Brisbane that she was rejected for a job at Australian budget airline Virgin Blue in late 2001, despite her 27 years' experience, because she didn't have the 'Virgin flair'.

She told a tribunal that its job interviews were little more than a 'cattle yard' for young blonde women. The Tribunal ruled against the airline, which went to the Supreme Court. In 2007, the airline lost in the Supreme Court too.