Mera Wala Pink

I have always viewed the world as essentially a simple place. Things are usually black or white, with occasional shades of grey. And yes, sometimes one does catch a glimpse of a rainbow, and then one is made aware of the seven colors that supposedly make up white - Violet, Indigo...basically the VIBGYOR. So all in all, 7 + 1 + 1+ 1, about 10 colors. Not too complicated for my rather constrained mental resources, though to be honest, I do get more than a little confused between violet and indigo. Remaining five I am absolutely confident about - wake me up at 2 a.m. and I should be able to tell a green from a red.

And then women talk about colors like peach, strawberry, magenta, beige, teal, mauve - and I am all at sea (then they ask me, which color sea? seagreen or seablue?) I always thought, and still do, that peach was a fruit with a sweetish-sour taste, and strawberry was the stuff icecreams were made of (when you wanted a change from vanilla in the hostel mess, that is). And now they tell me that you can have peach colored curtains. Will it attract ants - is my question, which of course, they deign to answer. I always thought turquoise blue was a tortoise with a special case of monday morning blues, but no, it is also a color. And then, a knowledgeable friend tells me, there are combined colors - those with an "ish" (not the Aish-in-Devdas variety). Brownish-yellow, for example. I am fascinated. Is bluish-green same as greenish-blue? Of course not, comes the indignant reply. Obviously, the basic properties of mathematics don't apply here.

What all this has done to me is dent my confidence completely, mercilessly, when it comes to identifying a color. As mentioned above, BGYOR I am comfortable with, and within each of these, if you ask me to stretch a bit, I can differentiate the light from the dark. So that makes it 10, apart from white, black and grey, and I strongly feel 13 is a good enough number (at least in this case) for a man to go about earning a honest living on this planet. At least as long as it does not involve shopping trips.

No wonder the Asian Paints "Mera wala pink" ad was such a huge success. It convinced all women that they were not imagining colors - and convinced all men that they were not the only ones who could not tell "this wala pink" from the other 9999 shades of - you guessed it - pink.

P.S. And I am no longer able to eat strawberry or peach - have eaten enough crayons in my childhood to have an appetite for colors anymore.