Colourless

Shantanu Thakur

(thakur.santanu@gmail.com)

Holi is not the only time you play with colours, even if you leave out nasty games like apartheid. Bharat Mata is known for Varna which includes shades of prejudice we would rather not talk about. In West Bengal, Didi had enough of red and aired her blues. Green Assam has been on a saffron spree trying to be a part of the Namami mainstream that has been flowing away from it for a long time now. And our hills have been blue and our river red! There's enough colour confusion already. As I type 'colour', the computer prompt says 'color' and not the 'colour' we grew up playing with – which is quite unholy one would say. Well, there was this Second World War veteran – founder Principal of the Silchar Medical College – who, when asked about his varna, would answer that apart from the skin exposed to suntan, the rest was fair! He would then give in to his trademark guffaws while the conservatives squirmed!

One could well understand his ire. Colour has been a social pestilence; not simply during Krishna's Holi; the list could go on. And, how about our seen-through-the-lens image of the 'gora' and his language which, as Big B had said, is a phunny language. Lord Macaulay notwithstanding. You could as well be able to laaph, taak or vaak English, but don't tell me you could think of adding further colour to it; Her Majesty's lingua franca continues to be phair – which again, is, probably unfair!

Back here in Kamaroopa, we wallow in the plebeian colours of the clay, earthlings as we are. And who would miss the once-in-a-year opportunity to take a sinful dip in this mahakumbh of colour confluence! Ancient as we are in heritage, we cannot just be expected to lag in confounding colour confusion – with some fair amount of mud thrown in and gleefully churned for us in the national cauldron!

Mark Antony put his arms around Cleopatra and said to his messenger of war: "Let Rome in Tiber melt… Kingdoms are clay..." We haven't got our clay wrong which, after all, is more or less of the same shade everywhere. Churchill had, before the midnight tryst with destiny, called us "men of straw". Take some dollops of clay, add a few straws and, hey presto, you have my first approved model of a God or a Goddess! And who was that brilliant young writer who reminded you that Gods also have feet of clay? Shastibrata? No wonder his God died young! He has now to get used to being remembered in small spaces like mine. Black today is white and white is black. In between, you are also the midnight children of Eastman and Technicolor; grow up as you did in Mother India!

Green, saffron and a bit of white are floating around. If you are confused, it's your fault and nobody else's. Remember Bhupenda's Aamai ekjon kalo manush daao, jar rakto kalo! This Bard from the banks of the Brahmaputra was, incidentally, the one who brought me my first Holi bagful of colours. Now, with him gone, where have all the rong gone!? Klaanto burha luit flows on; it's hengool, a shade paler.

My professor used to say that the backdrop is always black. The first sound, he also said, is silence. When you fast turn the vibgyor wheel, what colour does it blend into? The sounds you hear and the colours you see are the intermittent breaks. Without the breaks, you would either go blind or, deaf. I know, you might be seeing red when you would rather see blue, but, Bharat puttar, you have earned your hotchpotch of the afternoon rainbow which I would have loved to pull down and throw your way, but, no, these our hands will rather the multitudinous seas incarnadine, making the green one red! (Shakespeare, I know, will forgive the out-of-context misuse.) Red does no longer need to be had from behind the iron curtain, but, is homegrown and sold under the counter. Holi, or unholy, the Damocles's sword of a nuclear thread is surely making the world see red, or perhaps, cee laal!