Anita Bhagwandas always felt unattractive. Here’s how she learned to love what she saw in the mirror
“Anita Bhagwandas is really ugly.” This was an anonymous comment left on an online feature 10 years ago, when I was pictured alongside my more conventionally attractive, white colleagues. “Trolls will be trolls,” friends consoled when I told them of the incident.
The website editor said: “These things happen to public-facing women all the time, particularly women of colour,” when I asked her to take the comment down (she did). This was apparently just a sad fact of our life in our technological age, and the consensus was that I should forget all about it. Except that I couldn’t. I couldn’t let the word “ugly” go.