See your true colours shining through.

IN school, I was taught that the easiest way to remember the sequence of the seven colours of the rainbow was through this phrase – Richard Of York Gained Battle In Vain. (The underlined letters ROYGBIV represented the colours red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet). Of course there are people who seem to prefer the colours black and white. I must admit that the stark simplicity of black and white, particularly in photographs, can be rather striking. If you look through old albums that contain photos of yesteryear, it is partly their black and white hues that dredge up nostalgia for the past.

Meanwhile, businessmen, for instance, prefer to see all contracts drawn up in black and white – in “hard copy” form as they say these days. No grey areas for them – areas in which the agreement might have loop holes or ambiguity.

A colourful life: Colour plays an important role in our lives, from indicating when to drive and halt on the road to expressions used to describe a situation.

While grey areas indicate uncertainty, ironically, grey is quite an “in” colour as far as the human nervous system of man is concerned. Seriously speaking, grey matter is, in fact, part and parcel of it.

You see, a nerve cell is made up of a cell body and axons, dendrites and dendrons. For your information, it is the neural cell bodies that make up the grey matter.

In the cross section of the spinal cord, for instance, the concentration of cell bodies within its centre is what gives that area a grey shade.

Meanwhile, white matter is the region of the nervous system that is populated by the myelinated axons. The myelin sheath is a tissue that insulates the nerve axon and its very whiteness causes the contrast between areas containing cell bodies and those containing the axons. Throw in a few capillaries and the shade you actually get is a grey-brown colour.

As a young child, I always used to wonder what Hercule Poirot, the famous Belgian detective in Agatha Christie novels meant when he urged Captain Hastings, his sidekick, to use his “white cells” in the brain or the “grey matter” in it. It took Biology to teach me that he meant using his intelligence!

Talking about colour, this is how Agatha Christie describes Poirot in The Murder on the Orient Express in the initial pages:

“... a small man (Hercule Poirot) muffled up to the ears of whom nothing was visible but a pink-tipped nose and the two points of an upward-curled moustache.”

Although Poirot is often depicted as a bald man in movies, in the books, he is said to have an egg-shaped head with dark hair, which he dyes later in life.

He also has green eyes that are repeatedly described as shining “like a cat’s” when he is struck by a clever idea.

Ah, how colours ignite our imagination! Take the colour purple, for instance. Mention it and you will find yourself thinking of the famous book The Colour Purple, written by Alice Walker and made into a movie by the famous Steven Spielberg.

Published in 1982, the book tells the story of Celie, a black woman in the South. In America, blacks were basically the race of dark-skinned people who had their origins in Africa from where they had been shipped to America in the early 1800s to be slaves to the whites (the white-skinned Americans).

Today, the politically correct term to use for them is African Americans. You would be committing a social blunder if you called Barrack Obama a black to his face!

Talking about the colour black reminds me of the saying “the pot calling the kettle black” which simply means someone being a hypocrite. Just think of it. The pot is calling the kettle black, but it is black too!

It reminds me of the mother I heard telling her child not to say “Shut up” because it is impolite to do so. Then, the very next minute, she herself tells the child who is prattling away to “Shut up, for heaven’s sake!”

Some people consider the old saying about the pot and kettle a racist one because it uses the word black which, today, is considered an insult to some races.

I think the colour purple is still a safer colour to talk about. But, do be aware that if your face is becoming purple, it’s not a good sign. You are either suffocating, choking, have lost all your breath or are so angry that very little oxygen is travelling into your lungs! Yes, that’s what turning purple means!

Anyway, my favourite colour is blue. I think this is a very cool colour. However, when I was doing some reading up on the subject of colours in Hindu vastu shastra (Indian feng shui) books, I found out that for these practitioners, you have to be very careful where you use the colour blue.

For instance, while you may use blue for rooms in the western sector of the house and even as a lovely colour for bedrooms and rooms used for meditation, they generally do not recommend blue, black or grey for flooring, carpets or rugs. Did you know this?

I mean, black is all the rage these days in contemporary, modern kitchens accessorised with the gleaming silver of steel and aluminium cabinets. And, those kitchens look good, don’t they?

While the colour blue symbolises spring, new growth and relaxation, in the kitchen, and on the floor, “dark blue”, together with black and grey, is purportedly a colour associated with hopelessness, depression, tension and frustration.

The colour blue, representing the water element, is further believed to clash with the colour red, representing fire.

In the kitchen, vastu shastra experts (and also those well-versed with Chinese feng shui) will advise you not to place the sink (water element) too close to the burner (fire element). If you do so, you invite family disharmony.

Apparently, the colours green, yellow and orange are more supportive of the fire element in kitchens, particularly those located in the south-east sector.

For years, Indians have known that it is a vedic tradition to keep a ghee or oil lamp lit in this sector. Fire lit in the south-east is supposed to significantly reduce the negative effects of the faults, if any, in the design of the house.

The south-east direction is also referred as having the place of the Goddess of Food (grains). A vastu shastra saying – “pakashala agnikone syatsuswadubhojanaptaye” – actually means that food cooked in the south-east sector tastes the best (www.akhandjyothi.org).

Of course, you don’t have to believe any of this – you are welcome to choose any colour for your kitchen walls or floors. All I know is one shouldn’t take colours lightly. My younger daughter likes indigo and violet and chose, as her room colour, a lovely, toned-down shade of lavender. Till today, when I enter her room, I feel a sense of calm, joy and happiness. So, it really must be true that, along with the pink tones in her bed linen, the colours of her room inspire respect and love.

Personally, I agreed to the colours because I had read they were good for learning! Hers!

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