Here is the story of Ninja Singh, who was a victim of racism and physical abuse in the modeling industry, but untiringly neither giving up nor surrendering, she stood up face to face to the unjust cruel industry and decided to become the monitor of modeling industry in India, set up her own modelling agency for brown models and vowed to help people achieve the dreams of their lives without getting exploited.
Ninja Singh is an Indian model who won Ford supermodel in India in 2010 and moved to New York looking forward to being admired and getting amazing career opportunities, which on one hand became a nightmare but on the other hand also helped her to realize the purpose which her life should really be devoted to serve. When she moved to New York she realized that there brown women were massively objectified and are seen as an exotic decoration item that would give their product or campaign, an aesthetic outlook. She was offered work by an agency and the project was a nude photoshoot which she refused instantly. In an interview to ‘We the young India blog’, she said, ‘ the agency told me that the president of that agency is very influential in the industry and he is going to make you a supermodel overnight but I said I don’t give a damn to that guy and won’t do the project, after which I was kicked out.’
It shook her to the core because she had come a long way of success back at home and abroad she felt really inferior just because she was a model of color.
Then she fell in love with a white guy about whom she tells, “This guy was narcissistic; he used to hit me, tried kinky sex with me and burnt my leg one day”. She called for help and ended up in a psychiatry department because of hyperventilation. The eight hours she spent there were hell and then a brown psychiatrist who was the chief of the department that day after, listening to her story, helped her getting out of it because of the color they shared.
‘It really hit me that no matter who I am, no matter what I did, there was only one thing that mattered and it was the color of my skin which was enough for him to protect me.” That was the day she decided to devote her life for the people of her color, after moving back to India in 2017 she started her own company ‘Ninja Models’. ‘I decided to push away all those bad memories by helping people to achieve what they have dreamed as a child so that Ninja Singh doesn’t have to forget the trauma but come out of it shining and change the modeling trends starting from my own country, India’.
You can listen to her voice here.
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