Shades of colors in Life- Winner of IndiBloggers' Surprize prize ..

(A painting done at times when colors give more peace than white)

The first has its beauty, its pleasure, its essence and its colors.

The first yellow sunlight and still so orange

The first step on the brown land of black stones

The first colorful look through the black and white eyes

The first sip of the colorless water

The first dress of blue and pink dots

The first rain and the first blue splash

The first book and its grey cover

The first of green life and the first summer plant

The first nail paint and tongue twisting names

The first wall of the Asian paints – peach and plum

The first mango, way to the yellow world

The first traffic light, which was forever amber

The first trinket of blood with its redness

The first sip of nature and its colors for life.

‘Some things are meant to be Black and White’ said her Grandpa, if it would not have been for the fact that she knew him so well she would have believed him. Her GrandPa is an old GrandPa and like all Grandpas, he has a habit of running away from his most notorious and brain eating grandchild. Not satisfied with his answer, Srishti went out in search of someone who could tell her better ‘why a blackboard was black and a chalk white’. She had several linked questions to this particular one:

Why a chalk couldn’t be black

Why a blackboard couldn’t be white

And whether if it was white, we would call it a whiteboard?

Why the children in senior classes had no black but a white color big board in which teachers wrote with sketch pens (She was referring to the whiteboards and markers that are used as a medium of teaching the senior classes these days).

While all this was going on, I was watching silently from my window which fortunately for me (and unfortunately for the Sharma family) opened up in Srishti’s back garden. Though the child had asked questions which will bring about a smile on your face, she reminded me of some open questions I once had and are still unanswered.

When I was Srishti’s age, I had not wondered about the Blackboard and its blackness but about the sky and its colorless pouring wonder. I still remember my first rain and its colorless touch. It was something that meant and means a lot to me. However, at 6 I had popped out ‘Momma, I love pink color, can you ask the sky to pour pink rain in our house and blue in Rashmi’s when the next time it rains.’ My Mother had laughed so hard that the Roohafza Sharbat glass she was holding in her hands sprinkled some red drops on my dress. ‘I don’t like red- It hurts my eyes’ I had said. I had wished for pink, drops that would make my white frock colorful.

(The droplets of frozen water on the window of the car, looking green for some reason)

I love visiting zoo- the animals and their behavior, the rotten smells and the fresh air, the size of the limbs and that of the hair. Animals with their varied sizes and colors attract most of the young children. I love the black strips on the yellow tiger, the white dots on the giraffe’s brown body, the different shades of green on the parrot’s feathers, the grey color of the elephant’s vast body. What I don’t love is that there are no animals with orange or pink on their body that I have seen.

Wondered why the zebra was black and white,

Pink and Blue was what I would have liked,

Ever seen a green and yellow Panda

Playing with a mauve and red skunk

Wondered why the newspaper was boring

Was it because of the colors that were soaring

If it would have been the color of my candy

Blue, Pink, orange or may be Burgundy

Wondered when the chessboard will change

Out of the black and white square range

What if it changes to Beige and Lavender?

Out of the world will it be, I wonder

At the age of 12, my inquisitiveness led me to a different aspect of white all together. My grandmother changed a lot of her habitual traits, which I loved, during those days. She stopped putting red color on forehead. The big red bindi went missing. But the change that I disliked the most was that she stopped wearing any of the sarees, my mother had gifted her. I loved taking patterns from her saree and painting them in the art class- A parrot, a rangoli, a border and different squares. I did not like the plain, white and pattern less sarees she wore. All of them looked the same to me; the colors were all a shade of white. There was nothing special for the occasions and nothing different for the festivals. It was forever the white and its peace. I wanted the colors, the shades and the patterns back. I could not understand why the colors left her when my Grandfather died, I still can’t.

(Black white hooks, being sold in a shop.They look better on the red.)

Ever wondered why the sky was limitless

The giant heart of the world’s sadness

Every night sheltering the moon and the stars

The white misty morning and the black nightly scars

Wouldn’t it be better to welcome a new colorful sky?

Every night the moon in teal and stars plum joy

Ever wondered why it’s the black and white above so high?

(The night sky, on the darkest night)

I am an engineer by profession and one thing that stuck me hard during my engineering days were the heaps of clustered white pages, with small blackish copied writings on it (done in that way to save money). Yes, I am referring to the engineer’s bane and boon – The photocopies! Photocopies of senior’s notes, photocopies of class notes, photocopies of the topper’s notes and then photocopies of the photocopies done over the years. I hated the scrawny handwriting, the hours spent reading the clustered black uninteresting colorless writing of some author who might have at one time invented a black and white instrument. Often in my seclusion I thought, if only they were like rainbows, each page a different color, each paragraph a striking highlight, some green and some blue such that reading them was not so boring. In my 2nd of Engineering, I bought a new Desktop. All over the hardware parts there were Bar Codes printed. A small chit of white color, containing Black Lines in a random format. It acts as an identification or name for the hardware part. The first thought -'How come anything that boring and unreal can define something so colorful as 'Identity'.

Ever thought why, Ever desired the change
Base of Piano red and keys in colorful range

Ever desired a change for dangerous Khopdi and bones
Always seen in black base and white figure
I wonder the man of the Khopdi was without vigor

On Friday, I rose from by bed welcoming a glorious bright sunny morning, blue sky and green leaves of the Banyan tree. The brightness of the marigold and rose flowers was enchanting. The world seemed so beautiful with its colors. It would rain and then hopefully there will be a rainbow, a 7 band spectrum of hope, light, life and warmth. I was looking forward to the day.

He sat at the corner of the grand road, muffling the coins, among them finding the one with the highest worth. He was 45, but it was a difficult task. I remembered the rhyme ‘Roses are red, violets are blue, you love me and I love you’.

Roses were the same

So were the violets

The sky was the same

So was the earth

The mango was the same

So was the pear

The rain was the same

As he could hear

The night was the same

So was the noon

The yellow was the same

So was the red

The green was the same

So was the blue

Life was the same

Each day each night

So much black and little white

For he did not have the gift of sight.

I wish Life would be colorful for him some day ….

I am thankful to Indiblogger and HP for giving me a chance to remember the incidences of the need for colors. Please watch the above video to know how a colorless life might feel.

A special thanks to Shrikanth Balla, my colleague and Microsoft Genius photographer for providing all the pictures I needed.

To make your life colorful, a ray of yellow and blue, a streak of Burgundy and another of purple and to see the not so colorful things in the light of the VIBGYOR spectrum : do log onto to Splashing colors@HP