When Alyssa Vora was handed a colouring sheet in her school’s Values class, she didn’t expect the exercise to become the beginning of a book. The Grade 12 student remembers being handed a sheet with a Disney-like princess on it, along with a packet of crayons. “For the colour of the princess, everyone had used the peach-coloured crayon,” Vora recalls. The counsellor asked why no one had reached for the brown or black crayons — skin colours too. “And we said, ‘Yeah, that is interesting. Why didn’t we use it?’”

Vora tried the same experiment with her cousins. The result was the same. “That really got me thinking about how skin colours are represented in media, especially in India,” she says, “I thought that if we’re starting with kids so young, it must be something about the media that they’re exposed to that’s sort of making this happen.”