A heart-warming and rather jolly video from popular travel vlogger Sujith Bhakthan has been making the rounds on eternally fertile and entertaining Malayalam social media. This video, unlike most of Sujith’s work, doesn’t have anything to do with Kerala food or travel. He instead trains his lens on a different issue: how he’s had enough of irritating and nosy comments about his wife Shweta’s weight.
A Facebook live on Sujith’s personal Facebook profile, the 55-second video was shared by the Facebook group Pathanamthitta Live, and has since been viewed over 394,100 times. It shows a smiling Sujith and Shwetha against a scenic backdrop, presumably a tea plantation in Munnar, discussing fatness, fat-shaming and cruel trolls.
In the video, Sujith mentions that many people pass unwanted comments on Shwetha’s weight, and points out that he too has “athyavisham thadi” (or, he too is reasonably heavy), just like his wife. This is possibly a reference to how gendered fat-shaming can be, and how people unfairly target women for obesity when compared to men.
Her heart, he says, while tapping companionably on her breastbone, is very good, and her mind, as he pulls a smiling Shwetha close to him, says “is very pure”.
“I like ‘thadi’ (fat), no?” he asks Shwetha affectionately, to which Shwetha agrees with a soft “yes”.
"Don't people with higher weight also have to live? It's not only people with less weight who are beautiful men or women. Everyone has their own unique beauty. Real beauty lies on the inside, it's not about fatness or being thin,” he says.
Sujitha and Swetha married recently
Making an important point about fat-shaming, particularly online, Sujith says that some people post derogatory comments about Shwetha’s weight. A cheerful Shwetha interjects to say that she takes such comments in a positive way. While they may take it positively, people really should not post such awful comments, Sujith adds.
“Everyone has their own unique beauty, and real beauty doesn’t lie in external beauty, or fatness or thinness,” he says.
Sujith’s video comes at a time when global headlines are also tackling the nature of treatment meted out of people who are obese. On September 19, the Huffington Post put out a report titled ‘Everything You Know About Obesity is Wrong’, which grappled with “the counterproductive ways we addressed the obesity epidemic and the barbaric ways we treated fat people—long after we knew there was a better path”, and even spawned a response piece in US News titled 'Everything You Know About Obesity is Not Wrong'. Whatever their differences may be, however, both of these widely-read pieces agree on the point that people who are obese have been treated cruelly and unfairly for decades, and agree with Sujith’s points that they certainly should not be.