Colours

Many years back I watched an episode of “The Amazing Race” in which the participants came to India, I think it was either Kerala or Tamil Nadu. The female part of the team was amazed to see so many colours, and she said something like “Red, yellow, red, yellow, everywhere it’s red and yellow.” The Indian streets are indeed full of red and yellow, right from the yellow autorickshaws to the bright red gulmohar trees, from the red sindoor to the yellow paste on the foreheads of priests and devotees.

You must all have heard about the different properties possessed by each colour, for example blue is for calm and tranquility, red for passion, green for harmony, white for purity and so on. If you ask me what my favourite colour is I would say “Depends.” Which is pretty much my answer to everything (Who’s your favourite author? Depends. What’s your favourite food? Depends.)

When I was a child I hated pink. And orange. The only colour I remembered liking was blue. In my fifth birthday photo I wore a blue skirt (I don’t know what the material was called but it was real soft and fell in folds). Unfortunately it was a black and white photo, but I still remember that skirt vividly, its exact shade of blue and the little red flowers sprayed on it. Green and yellow fought for second place, but most of the time green had the upper hand. Reds and pinks I had a few, I can’t recall having a single black (what mother makes her daughter wear black anyway?)

In my teens I favoured brown (ugh such a drab colour, now I avoid it completely). I started wearing pink and orange in my twenties (oh God my twenties! I sound positively middle aged), and purple, ahh such a magnificent colour, no wonder royalty was such a big fan. It is now one of my favourite colours, along with new entries like gold and sea-green. I am not much of a black person, but I admire its versatility and timelessness. You can never go wrong with black. On the other hand I love white - its purity, freshness and cleanness. And yellow for the sunshine it brings, for making you feel alive and happy.