Color me blind — waxing eloquent about tints

Notwithstanding the sighting of any coveted rainbows in the sky, hierarchies exist in the colour world too. Despite the abuse that the colour palette routinely suffers in human hands, hues are a practical ‘do or dye’ lot.

We see red, feel blue. White lies dance on our black tongue. We are beaten black and blue, want everything in black and white. Go green with envy or are green around the gills. Our health is in the pink and our heels nude. Companies are in the red or in the black.

There’s yellow journalism alongside pink papers. We wave white flags to denote surrender and segregate our daily porn into fifty shades of gray. Ashen-faced is interesting in that, presumably, the rest of the body remains non-ashen.

The Color Purple, Pink and Blue is the Warmest Color are movies. In the spiritual world, we are asked to imagine a bright white light in a sort of divine racism. If Christian brides and Hindu widows don white, it only denotes purity. Flowers have to mind it too; no red roses for a corpse, no white lilies for a sweetheart.

Racism of course divides us lazily by skin – human beings are broadly available in black, white, yellow, brown and now even orange. In India, where we have our own ‘wheatish’ version, the use of the word ‘colour’ itself denotes only one particular complexion. ‘She has no colour’ and ‘she has good colour’ only speak of that single shade, white aka ‘fair’.

The obsession with ‘colour’ surfaces in photographs of yore where a liberal use of talcum powder supplied the comical touch. A small dot sat blackly on many a baby cheek to ward off the evil eye.

While black hearts are no compliment and black-outs undesirable, white too has its bleak moments. It describes fear: ‘He turned white’. Or grief: ‘His hair turned white overnight.’ A whiter shade of pale, sang Procol Harum, confusing home décor enthusiasts looking for mera waalah white. This song, it is said, was about a drunken sexual escapade.

Blue of course has a huge fan following. As Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky said, ‘Blue is the typical heavenly colour.’ In some blue news, a new pigment of blue is now available. YInMn Blue is named after its components yttrium, indium and manganese.

It was while experimenting with rare earth elements that some chemists of Oregon State University, led by Mas Subramanian, created this new blue quite by accident. Out of the blue, literally.

Writers are always waxing eloquent about tints. The pale moon in the night sky, the golden sun in the pink dawn, silvery sheets of rain... And while eyes are mostly boringly black in our side of town, interspersed only with catty mentions of ‘cat eyes’, descriptions of eye colour universally manage to run into paragraphs of breathless prose.

Blue-blooded and blue-collared, feeling oh so blue while singing the blues out of the blue on a blue moon night... Oh dear, have I painted myself into a corner?