Where have all the colours gone?

Having been a Jeans and t-shirt person all through my young life, I had gone berserk in the year after I got married. I wore all the feminine Indian clothes- brightly coloured with matching jewellery and bangles to boot! And Boy! Had I enjoyed myself! Green, purple, orange all the possible loud colours had suddenly become my favourite. Of course over the years I have mellowed and refrain from wearing too bright a colour. But give me a chance (A wedding or a festival) I am back, wallowing in the multiple hues of life.

“Hey! Isn’t that a lovely shade of black”, said the twenty something to her pal beside her.

“That’s good”, agreed the pal, “but you should have seen the black Sheena was wearing yesterday! it was to die for”.

These days I am like R.K.Laxman’s “Common man”, I am here , there and everywhere with a bag over my shoulder; a very silent spectator of the drama of life. If I could draw, I would be another famous cartoonist.

Listening to the above conversation, I wondered what were the shades of black? Of course I had heard of this book called the “Fifty shades of grey” but shades of black was what I had not heard of. When in doubt Google is my mantra. Sure enough Wikipedia had seventeen different shades of black listed!

For a change I tried to be “in the moment” and started looking around and noticing all the young people who  were crowded in and outside the fast food restaurant, smoking, having tea or coffee or some junk food or the other. The young men (I was pleasantly surprised) were quite nattily dressed and most of them looked healthy and well built (the gym effect?) The girls were a different story, fifty percent of them were overweight, the other fifty percent were a mixture of toned bodies, normal bodies, anorexic bodies and normal skinny ones.

Whether it was “the black conversation” I overheard or the general gloominess in the political scenario, I saw that the bottom half of  all the girls were black. Most of them wore black leggings, some wore the very popular jeggings, many had on the formal trousers (There are many offices in the vicinity) and a miniscule few had churidars on.  So if you were to be polite and not stare, you would focus on the bottom half, right? Well there was a virtual sea of black, weaving in and out on the grey asphalt! I must have seen this before, but I had never been conscious of this fact.

Can you picture what I saw? Black sea with smoke rising from within it! The smoke could be the cigarettes or from the steaming cups of tea and coffee. Whatever it was, my world looked a little drab and forlorn. As I swept my eyes surreptitiously from ground zero to an altitude of five feet plus, I noticed the tops were either different shades of white( Check it out on google) or blue or pink. Where I wondered had the greens, purples, oranges or even the  bright yellow gone?

I did not look at the men, they anyway never had a great colour palette, it was the girls I was inspecting. Where had all the feminine love for bright hues gone? Why were they all following a uniform code of conduct for dressing? Agreed black makes you look slimmer, so I understood the penchant for bottom halves being black but what about the top half? Don’t we women always want to stand out? Be different from the others? Why if a film actress wears a dress which is even two percent similar to another actress’s dress the tabloids go crazy putting up the two pictures and pointing out the similarities! Fortunately I have cut off our cable Television otherwise all the news channels would be airing the same picture again and again!

Now that I had become conscious of the new fad, my eyes went on searching for a different picture in various backgrounds. The next time I went to the Mall I looked discerningly at the crowd. In the food court it was all dark under the table! I also noticed that three new brands of leggings had set up shop in different parts of the mall.

Out of curiosity I went into my favourite one “Go Colours” and asked them what colour had the highest sale. The answer was not much of a surprise- it was black of course! I then asked them about the different shades of black and they were very aware of it. (I felt such a dodo!)

“Why do you have such a wonderful display of rainbow colour leggings, jeggings and what not?”, I asked inquisitively.

The salesman had the patience of a saint, he said, “That is for display, it attracts customers”.

“But there are very few blacks?”, I objected.

“Madam we have a store room at the back filled with them. They do not look good on display, so we do not put them out”, the salesman said dismissively.

Having learnt a valuable lesson, I realised that even though the world is turning into a colourless graveyard, the human mind is still alive. Why do I say that? Well as long as the hoardings and displays depend on colours to attract customers then all is right with the world and God is in his heaven.

Maybe this is just a phase and my colours will creep back into the world like a time lapse picture of winter turning to spring!

Till it does will anyone answer my question- Where have all the colours gone?