Another year, another Coachella, another trend hindered in cultural appropriation. As for this year’s craze, bindi’s made quite the statement. And yes, while it may be some aspect of fashion it also entails identify, confidence, and spirituality. 

The bindi is not your go to music festival fashion accessory. It is of something with generations of significant cultural value, one that is definitely not meant to be so easily white-washed. 

 Being a Hindu brought up in America for the majority of my life, it wasn’t an unfamiliar sight to see my mother receive countless amount peculiar looks for wearing a bindi outside of the house. We would constantly get glared down by people while walking across the grocery aisle or entering a store in our local shopping mall. It never bothered me though. To me, it was the culture I was born into and it was the culture I was proud to be a part of for I was to embrace my identity. Until one day I wore my bindi to school to show my friends. Contrary to what I hoped they would be fascinated with, I essentially ended up going home drenched in my own tears. I was criticized for wearing ‘a dot on my forehead’ in a land that was not mine yet nowadays the same people that once tormented me parade around representing my culture in a way that is not only hypocritical but offensive. 

While there are a few people amongst many that do, in fact, recognise the symbolism of a bindi as a concept of wisdom and spiritual development, the majority seem to cross the fine line that separates appreciation and appropriation. This problem tends to arise when one fails to understand that they are deemphasizing the spiritual aspect of such objects through blatant ignorance and candor. Depriving the Hindu aspects that are held in a bindi to merely make it an American fashion trend shows just how must respect you have for a culture. 

So to the people who consider bindi’s to be displayed as accessories or bangles to be worn as bracelets, let me remind you that these physical symbols are a celebration of a culture. Nevertheless, they are not something to be stripped of respect by being made into something as trivial as the next and oncoming fashion statement. 

 It is not, after all, just a dot.