Vibgyor

Vibgyor

I was very good at drawing and painting since my school days and I used to get 100% marks always. My fascination for colours goes back to my childhood, but if anyone asked me which one do I like, my answer was always ‘White’! Why I don’t know but the plethora of colours was restricted to drawing paper only. Was it because I was on the darker side and anything that’s away from it was welcome. And so of course the ultimate was white!

As I grew older and started getting over the dogma about my complexion I was told, girls like ‘Tall, Dark and Handsome!’ Effect of ‘Mills and Boons’ heroes. I was/am tall, dark. Handsome? Maybe, beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder, but my son is acceptably handsome and now people say that I looked like him when I was younger [River sometimes does flow in reverse!] But that’s not the point.

When I started playing with colours, naturally, the next step was their connotations. And there it was. Not only colour-wise but interpretation wise too there were myriads of shades, of emotion, symbolization, hidden meanings and so many avatars of the human facade.

It is not surprising that these given meanings to the colours vary from culture to culture from country to country, religion not lagging far behind.

Red for that matter is colour of blood, in a way colour of life, for a doctor like me. Because if it’s not red, it means you are dead. But not for the common man on the street, for him ‘It’s Bloody hell! ’At one level, it dons the avatar of danger in most of the civil societies. Simple traffic lights too shout, ‘Wait, its danger ahead!’ Blaring sirens of firefighters declare loudly about the danger around the corner and they again are Red in colour! In today’s scenario, it’s not at all surprising because they practically are ruling over the entire world. The colour of happiness in China is Red! How apt and at the same time paradoxical, the world is under the danger of Corona, Red and China is enjoying at the cost of the world economy, Red, I am happy! Almost Schizophrenic!

Blue, maybe having different layers of meanings at different levels. Crystal clear blue sky is an invitation to fly, to adventure. It’s a macho colour reserved for the boys but at the same time, it’s the colour of mental illness! When one gets blues, he/she/it is gone! But in Christianity Mary always wears Blues, as she and the colour symbolizes, serenity spirituality and wisdom! Far from one having Blues!

The one who has not seen Shah Rukh Khan prancing in the yellow fields of mustard has not seen the Bollywood! Yellow is colour of brightness, of sunshine when it’s not harsh! To sip a warm, steaming cup of ginger laced tea in the early winter mornings when the sun rays give golden-yellow hue to everything around, is just divine. The silky touch of yellow hue lifts your spirits to a different high, without loading real spirits! And then one wonders, why the colour of cowardice is yellow? Or that of a biased person who is supposed to have ‘jaundice’ and everything he sees is just yellow to him!

Brown brings everybody to their feet, even if you are flying high in the blue skies miles above. It’s the colour of earthiness. To have feet firmly on terra firma is the sign of ultimate macho, a person who is completely in control of himself and the surrounding, whether the people or the situation. But it’s also the colour of devastation along with ash because after any catastrophe the Mother Nature comes in her real form covering everything in the colour of mud!

Green is the colour of envy? I really don’t get why? In a real sense, it’s the colour of prosperity and youth. An oldie who maintains his youth even in advanced age, isn’t he ‘Green’? I remembered words of famous writer Mr P L Deshpande while landing down on the Cairo Airport. Miles and miles of dry and arid desert in ‘Hafiz Contractor’ hue burns your eyes. To select colour Green for his religion in such environs Prophet Mohammad was visionary par excellence. Green gives such a soothing in that barren terrain, that it literarily lifts up all your senses. When dry parched earth gets her first drop of rain after a scorching summer, she celebrates it by giving birth to a young sapling donning bright green, the colour of rebirth, regeneration!

Vibgyor! The plethora of colours, selected by the LGBT community, not for nothing. They want to encompass all the hues and shades, no biases, no prejudices!

But really that’s not the point of this blog. Black and white! Are the colours in the true sense or just the shades? Or have they gone beyond that and have divided the world in two where yellows and browns don’t count!

The movement ‘Black Lives Matter’ does have serious connotations beyond the words alone. Though as declared at the start, I like ‘White’, I now have serious doubts. The history tells us, the White has maligned its own meaning. We worship the Sun because that’s the only thing which makes us, our planetary system. Our very survival started with it, going on with it and is going to end with it. So for centuries, we are worshipping that’s ‘Bright, warm and white!’ Automatically it started brewing in all societies that something, when it’s not bright or white, is ‘Dark’ ‘Black’, in the end sinister. Till the time it was metaphoric, like, ‘Black Money, Black magic, Black Deeds’ it could be understood, in the artistic sense but when it percolated down to human beings as racial discrimination, it has to be realized that the time has come to reject it, abhor it, revolt against it! The whites are instrumental in wiping away Natives Americans from the Americas, Maoris and aborigines down south, and have thrust the atrocities on the locals wherever they landed with ulterior motives, be it India or Africa.

The Vibgyor when comes together makes white. Today the very essence of it is at stake. Does really the amount of melanin under your skin is that important? To say ‘Black is beautiful’ amounts to accept the very notion, as it is coined to negate the supremacy of white. Let’s all just say, “It does not matter, what matters are lives, of all!”