I saw this pretty desi woman dressed in a sunflower yellow shalwar kameez with turquoise details. The neck line was particularly interesting with turquoise beads and cutwork. She was the solitary splash of brightness in the monotone of blue jeans, sweat pants, khaki shorts and non-descripts tees at the grocery store.
Like me, several others noticed her. Back home seeing women dressed in bright colors was so commonplace that I never gave it a second thought. I used to be like her once - dress in colorful cottons paired with terracotta and silver jewelry. Wearing a contrasting two-tone outfit like this woman seems very unnatural now. Not sure at what point it became difficult to feel at ease in the color palette that I grew up with and loved as well.
Maybe being exposed constantly to the western color palette has alienated me from my native sensibilities. Even some of these beautiful combinations inspired by the masters lacks the warmth and pizzazz of a Indian woman's colorful attire. Yellow and turquoise may not be very masterful but it brightened my day just to see them paired and I'm sure a lot of us girls in our faded tees and jeans wished we could pull off that bright plumed tropical bird look as the yellow and blue chiffon dupatta trimmed with hand-made blue lace floated past us.
Like the author of this article, I have often wondered if the green I see is the same as the green another person sees. How can we know we see the same thing even when we call it green. It is hard to accept that people may see the color differently and still call it the same thing. It calls into question the small core of things we hold to be universal.
The notion that pain varies between individuals does not disturb us. Why, then, do we resist the idea that different people see different colours? Whereas the sensation of pain is related to individual tolerance for it and it makes sense that people feel different intensities, the same is not true about colors. As the author points out : There is a lawfulness to colour, and it would help if we knew where this lawfulness resided If red and green did not have the same universal connotation, they could not be used to traffic lights. My green being your red would just not work. Yet my green is likely a little different from yours. Synaesthesia may simply be an exotic manifestation of something we all enjoy: the ability to turn sensations into symbols, and to think with them. After all, if our thoughts are not made of sensations, what are they made of? And this is why we find it so distressing, you and I, to realise that we don't see the same colours. Colours - so striking, so beautiful, so manifestly there - are one of the few things we can agree on, more or less. How cast adrift will we feel if colours turn out to be, after all, only our thoughts about light?
Even in the 80s in India, Benetton was a familiar name thanks to the deliberately provocative and often politically incorrect ads. They made you wonder about the message being conveyed and what the "United Colors of Benetten" truly stood for.
Color is pervasive and universally understood and it seemed that the company chose to play on those themes much like the famous Jensen & Nicholson ad for paint "Whenever you see colour, think of us". Unlike the paint ad, Benetton’s word and picture play on color was fraught with conflict, high on shock quotient and sent mixed signals. You did not know whether to view it commentary on news and events or just creative ad copy
Benetton’s ads provided an early example of the erosion of clear distinctions between types of information – between sales talk and independent reporting and commentary – as corporations sought to gain attention for their products and enhance their brand images by establishing themselves in the viewer’s mind as content-providers in their own right.
I miss the Benetton-ad genre both in print and online media with its blatant disregard for established industry norms.
Most women are attracted to men who are good conversationlists and have a sense of humor. Musical ability is a definite plus. Turns out that all of those attributes are a function of a good brain and as such good genes - the human equivalent of a flashy plume or tail.
Brains are like the Dow Jones index, which is an accessible and generally trustworthy gauge of a complex system because its rooted in a number of important stocks.
So males strut their stuff by crooning, being witty, and speaking well, while the females use these clues to sort out the best one to take home to mom and dad.
Unfortuntaley the absence of a "real" plume may work to the disadvantage of the human female because the male of her heart's desire may have atended charm school to learn his bag of tricks. Those perfect bon mots could breathe their last on the walk down the aisle.
Every evening when I go to pick J up from daycare she shows me all her artwork in a state of feverish excitement. There is profusion of hearts and flowers around stick figures with smiley faces. Sometimes greenery, sky, sun and clouds make an appearance.
Almost all of them have the words "I Love Mommy" on them. My heart brims with gratitude to be remembered and missed all day. It takes superhuman effort to put any of these little love notes in the trash but as their pile grows mountain high, I realize that we also need room to live. I tell myself I don't take for granted that I am well loved.
I notice a lot of the other children are avid painters as well. Though their work is similar in level of sophistication as J's, I find it hard to understand the underpinnings of their art. Kids art is almost always surreal -a lot can be represented by very little, things have layers of meaning. I love to hear J explain her drawings and choice of colors to me. If I knew anything about kid art psychology I may have found reasons to worry as well given the exclusively bright and happy colors, the multitude of hearts, smileys and sunflowers. There is only so much a maxed out single mother can think.
Over time I have come to understand the latent symbolism in them. It is an advantage that I don't have with the other young artists - I have not been educated in their repertoire of symbols. My acquaintance with kids art has grown enormously by and through J. I am to the point where I find it a lot more interesting than a well executed landscape by an adult painter.
We were in a craft store yesterday. The sight of paintbrushes and color made me nostalgic for my own water color supplies that had fallen to disuse at the end of high school. My old paintbrushes must be gathering dust in some forgotten box in my parents' home. I am almost tempted to revive and relearn my lost love for Chinese watercolor. Maybe if I painted alongside J, we could both learn from each other.
Reading this article on Slate about being chic and prematurely gray reminds me of a Mrs. Surti I once used to know. Possibly the most elegant woman I have come across, she was in her late 40s when I first saw her. Just a little overweight, with radiant skin and unshaped eyebrows she left her almost entirely gray hair undyed. When she walked into a room, people noticed. Maybe it was her understated style - subtle make-up, classic jewelry, beautiful but unpretentious saris.
The only thing that drew obvious attention were her lustrous silver curls. I have never seen a woman make age look more gorgeous and desirable - she stripped youth of its cachet. I wondered if it were possible that she had grown more attractive with age. Though I have never seen her in her younger years, I can't imagine that she created the same impression with dark hair and an hour glass figure - she would just be another beautiful young woman, most of whom would have faded away with age.
My cousin Mimi wore brown on her brother's wedding because she wanted to be understated. At Indian weddings, the sister of the groom is perhaps the most over-dressed person after the bride and here was Mimi in a dull, depressing shade of brown several shades lighter than her deep brown eyes. She could as well have come to a funeral. We had to field questions from inquisitive guests about her "unusual" attire all evening.
She used to be my favorite little sister - Mimi of sparkling eyes, pretty smile and quick wit. I don't recall exactly when all of that changed for the color brown to take over her life. She stopped singing. I don't remember what her laughter sounded like. Increasingly that was the only color she wore - to her the color of understatement. I was not aware that Mimi had ever been guilty of overstatement.
Her love of brown extended to rich chocolate cake, coffee, leather satchels and a mood of melancholy that approximated the bleak season when trees turn leafless - an endless sea of brown. Because of Mimi, brown came to be associated with sadness and loss for me. I no longer recall what it meant to me before it turned synonymous with Mimi. Because of her, I panic when my wardrobe starts to become dominated by any one color. I make haste to break the pattern, throw some randomness in. Because of her, I know I can't let a color overpower me.
This is a yarn about yarn and three generations. It starts at a time when there was such a thing as the USSR but glasnost and perestroika were blowing winds of change. We subscribed to a Soviet magazine whose name I forget. It went out of publication when the country ceased to exist giving the final issue much historic significance.
In that last issue was the pattern for a sweater than my mother and I loved. The model was a pretty Ukrainian teenager. That winter I came upon a sweater like hers in the color of burnt amber instead of periwinkle blue like in the picture. I have worn it sparingly and it is one of my favorites. My mother loved to knit and I had plenty of hand made sweaters growing up.
This morning I wore my favorite amber colored cardigan. J looked at it admiringly - I thought I saw some longing in her eyes as well. I asked her "Do you like my sweater ?" and she said "Yes, I do". I told her "You grandma knit it for me many years ago. You can have it when you're big enough to wear it" J declared promptly "My grandma is knitting a pretty sweater for me right now. I'm going to have my very own" My heart went out to J when I heard that. She has no way of knowing why.
When J was born, my mother and I picked up some beautiful yarn and decorative buttons and browsed sweater patterns together. J was supposed to have the prettiest dream in knitted yarn come true. My marriage broke up, the balls of yarn and buttons traveled with me half the way across the world. They lay forgotten in the closet for many winters - four to be precise. Each time my mother went back to them, something fairly cataclysmic happened and she had to abandon her project.
The two half way knit sweaters that should have been J's bear testimony to the battles of the last four years - the heavy toll it has taken or our otherwise uncomplicated lives. The first four years of J's childhood are now past - her grandma has not been able to knit for her like she would have loved and longed to. It is one among the many memories J will not have. That I should have more than I have been able to give my child makes me wistful.
Maybe J is right - her grandma is knitting once again. Maybe with other yarn, another time - a happier time. J will wear something like my favorite burnt amber sweater and remember all the loving that went into making it.
Biopresence aims to create "Transgenic Tombstones" though "transcoding and entwinement of human and tree DNAs". A fascinating idea that the physical essence of a loved one could live forever in a flowering tree in your yard. Some lines from Neruda's "Nothing But Death" come to mind reading this where he says of Death:
I'm not sure, I understand only a little, I can hardly see, but it seems to me that its singing has the color of damp violets, of violets that are at home in the earth, because the face of death is green, and the look death gives is green, with the penetrating dampness of a violet leaf and the somber color of embittered winter.
J loves the color blue lately. Before it used to be pink. I am concerned at her change of heart and wonder if there is something on her mind that dictates this change. Being uber sensitive about color, I went ahead and harangued her at length on why blue is a no-no in my book. How happiness and affinity for certain colors are related. She listened quietly as she always does. Later , I googled on blue to see what it is all about…also trying to discover why I don't like almost any shade of it.
Of course at a deeper level I am concerned at her new love for this color because of it's associations with R. He loved it and made me start to like it - almost unconsciously. I had to work myself out of blue and took some effort. That was the thing about R he could cause me to morph without my knowledge. I would know it only after the effect and often that was too late.
I looked up color therapy and took the Lusher's Color Test. It analyzed me pretty good.
Blue could mean different things to different people. It could mean calm, controlled, tranquil and empowered to J and merely depressing to me. I however impose my world view on my little girl like many over-zealous parents do. I justify myself saying I am trying to protect her. Who knows what my real motivations might be..
I have been observing a phenomenon for a while now. It started with my being invited to more meetings than I care to attend or need to. It comes free with the job description and makes me long to be a programmer left alone to mire in the cesspool of my own code.
Coming back to the meetings. I get bored after the five minutes of these hour long jamborees. With nothing left to do I survey the people seated, talking, gesticulating, making inside jokes that I don't quite get because of my unfamiliarity with TV sitcoms and Hollywood blockbusters.
It is amazing that almost all humor is derived exclusively from the aforementioned sources. The Indian equivalent would be laughing over Kader Khan histrionics from a popular Bollywood flick. It's a cultural niche not to mention an acquired taste.
Anyways, my survey took an interesting turn when I started to analyze trends in my random observations. Most of the younger women (from the late twenties to the mid thirties) wore identical diamond solitaries and wedding bands. Different colors of gold an occasional platinum. The diamonds were almost always impressively sized but lacking in all the C's that count.
Big is beautiful seems to be the mantra. So when hands (left significantly more often than right) gesture from different parts of the conference room, the stones seem to claim "My marriage is the bigger better deal than yours. Proof is my rock is bigger" As an outsider I watch the display with much interest. Since when did marriage turn into a competitive sport ?
The first thing to strike me as interesting was uniformity. Conformism and total lack of imagination. The prescription wedding and engagement ring sets. No one did anything different. Maybe the marriages were pretty similar too but I can't vouch for that.
Over the years I have also seen that the older women are ring less or may at best sport an engagement ring - here today gone tomorrow. Sometimes going through several different ones in a relatively short period of time.
In general a woman with a ring is imbued with a sense of superiority over one without one. Even an engagement ring does not quite cut it. Even if the rock in question is a stunner. The band and the rock together defines Nirvana - it probably proves indisputable ownership of a man.
I am an outlier in more than one way. I am in the age group that is married and proudly flaunting it, oblivious of the ominous older, ring less fingers all around them. Yet I do not have a wedding ring ; I am not the same color or race. They view me as a cultural anomaly that piques their curiosity but not for long. After a while I turn into the fly on the wall and get a chance to absorb and assimilate.
While in America, I have lived and worked in the South and the North East. The number of divorced southern gentlemen in a random sampling at the work place was fairly high. I remember one instance when five out of the seven men in a group I had gone out to lunch with were without wedding bands. In the North East (in my conservative neck of the woods at least) almost any male in the group is likely to be married.
The real disparity is in the number of older women who are divorced as compared to the older men. These women appear fated to be ring less because the men their age are inevitably balled and chained to another. That is a real pity. These older woman find themselves hitting clubs and bars on a Friday even only to be accosted by freaks who have had too much to drink.
Sometimes, younger girl-friends such as I hear those horror stories on Monday during lunch hour. When they ask me "Why don't you go out and date ? You are young and attractive - you should be able to find someone easy." I am left speechless. To explain to them the dynamics of the Indian dating going on mating deal is a task more daunting than I am willing to undertake over a Caesar salad and V8.