Synchronicity and serendipity are two words that describe the way Mumbai-based software designer Seema Harindran and artist Reva Pandit met on a local train recently. They were both travelling in the ladies compartment of a Mumbai local, when Seema caught Reva staring at her. Soon they got talking, and Reva revealed that Seema looked exactly like an illustration of Kali she had drawn from her imagination. The two women quickly hatched a plan to meet and bring that painting to life by using Seema's face as the canvas.

On her Facebook page, Kali - The Dark One, Seema wrote:

"All my life I’ve been ridiculed for being dark skinned. The fair skin obsession in India doubled my self esteem issues as a teenager and I was constantly discriminated against because of my dark skin. The word “kali” (a dark skinned girl) haunted me because it was the word used by most people to mock my skin colour. It reduced my identity to my skin colour and I’ve spent my whole life running away from this word. Until I met Reva Pandit, who completely flipped this word around for me, and added a whole new perspective to my life."

When Seema saw the intricate drawing, she was mesmerized. Reva's interpretation of Kali had the "same wide nose, large eyes, long chin and m-shaped hairline" as Seema.

"And just like that, she changed the definition of the word “kali” in my life. For the first time, someone had called me Kali (capitalized, meaning the goddess Kali) and I felt nothing but proud. I had spent my whole life feeling sorry about being called kali and never once thought that I could just think of it as being like goddess Kali. Reva needed to walk into my life with a smile and tell me that I looked like her interpretation of Kali."

Despite this, Seema had some reservations about looking scary.

"The sketch Reva had made was pen on paper, so on my way to her friend’s place, I wondered what I would look like. I thought she would probably paint my face white and then paint the black strokes over the white base. Her Kali also looked fierce and scary and I wondered if I could pull it off. Did I want to appear scary? As women, we are always portraying ourselves as either happy, sweet or sexy. No one intentionally puts a scary picture of themselves out there. I wondered about the audience of the pictures she would take and if the audience would dismiss me as too scary. Just at that moment, I remembered that the main point of this was Reva’s art and not me and I told my thoughts about appearances to take a hike."

But, just like us, she was fascinated by the transformation.

"The final product was magical. I was spellbound when I saw myself at the end. It was unconventional, scary and fierce. It raised a proverbial middle finger to our beauty standards, because we unwittingly also apply the same standards to goddesses."

We can't agree more with Seema's final words in her Facebook note - "So screw beauty standards. Be you. Channel a goddess. Heck, be a lovely, fierce, angry, empowered, Indian Goddess. There’s one inside each one of us."