Conspiracies of Colours

By Harish Kumar

Wherever he goes, colours chase him and hound him. They dog him to no end. He is a committed chromophobe, a victim of a strange condition called chronic malachromia. His aversion to colours and the deep hatred he nurses for them is not a new phenomenon. He developed them right when he was a teenager. Later as a journalist, he finds himself victimised by colours, whichever publication he worked for. Disgusted, he quits active journalism in the quest of colour-free vocations such as e-publishing and teaching.

Sadly, he discovers to his dismay the entire knowledge sector is awash in duplicitous colours. That pushes him to turn to non-profits. And later to electoral politics, which survives solely on double-timing colours. Seeing no escape from colour conspiracies, the committed chromophobe turns into a colours-chasing chromophiliac. Nevertheless, colours continue to conspire against him. Felled by fatal colour conspiracies again and again, he relapses into chromophobia. There on, his life story takes a tragic turn.

What happens to him finally? What are colours doing in his life now? Where do colours finally take him? Do the diabolical conspiracies of colours, integral parts of every human life, succeed in getting him finally?

Conspiracies of Colours is not just the story of a chromophobe. It is the story that reflects on the colour-dilemmas everyone of us face and the shocking story of the duplicitous lives most of us lead today. Packed and peppered with colour aphorisms, colour wisecracks and colour anecdotes, this edge-of-the-seat thriller is a must-read for everyone. Simply because this is everyone's story as we all continue to be victims of colours sometime or other.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Harish Kumar
• Release date: Apr 22, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393528289

Book preview

Conspiracies of Colours

1    

I hate colours. I fear them all. I am a self-confessed chromophobe and a bleached personality. Here is the unvarnished truth: colours make me go anaemic, turn me pale in the face and leave me starched in my looks.

This chromo-aversion gets stronger every time  I see people exploiting colours to mask themselves to masquerade as what they want the world to see them to be. Believe me, colours play a soul-destroying role.

With a quiet sadness, I put this down in my diary: as manipulative disguise-agents, colours have downgraded my professional standing and have painted me in the darkest shades of my social life.

It happened nearly two decades ago, when   I was just entering the teens. The sun was at its scorching best. On that Sunday afternoon, at home,   I had dozed off. When? I do not know. Was that a cat’s nap? Do not remember either.

As I jacked up my head, twisted and turned it 90 degrees both sides, I couldn’t see anything - no Mom, nobody. Only an eerie emptiness engulfed me. 

I crawled up the stairs, right to the top. I heard some strange muffled moanings there, just behind the closed door that was painted green. A minor crack on that door was good enough to allow me a half view.   I could see a strange naked male moving over my naked Mom. My frame froze at once. 

This image keeps flashing across my eyes, across my mind and across my thoughts, all the time. It just refuses to go away. Age hasn’t faded that memory. Time hasn’t withered that mental image.

The passing years have only sharpened my perception about colours and the dubious roles they play in human lives and relationships. 

Perhaps forward from that day, whenever I see green, I see infidelity, I see double-timing, I see double-crossing, I see clandestine extra-marital liaisons and I see cuckoldry.

Soon after, my father killed himself, unable to bear the public ignominy. After all, it was a closed conservative society we were all in. We are still.

By the way, wasn’t it sheer happenstance that the door was painted green? Could have been. But, the colour green on that fateful day’s door remains stuck in my memory grooves like a dried paint.

I am sure you are paranoid, asserted Vikram, hoping against hope that he could retrieve me from my peculiar colour-condition. Vikram, my pal of many years, just failed to convince me, as usual.

The aversion to green I developed on that day and the horror it evoked in me continue to remain firmly etched in my memory. No signs to date that   it is likely to peel away into oblivion.

Later, when my English teacher metaphorised green for envy and explained me the phrasal usage of turning green with envy, I could think only of turning green with horror.

It is a sheer mental condition. How else should I explain this when you have begun to hate all colours now, Vikram keeps harping to this day.

As a well-wishing friend, is Vikram right?   Am I   a victim of some obsessive compulsive disorder? Am I paranoid over the memory-stills of that day which remain obstinately stuck in the unrelenting crevices of my mind? Am I a fertile case study for all those perennially-probing psychologists?

Perhaps clinical researchers could call my morbid aversion to colours and my medically-curious mental state as malachromia.

Let them jargonise my psychological state and my grave aversion to colours. Let them discuss, debate and analyse the state of my mind through revealing Powerpoints in medical seminars and continuing medical education conferences.

Do they help me? Nope.

I hate colours for what they stand for and for what they deliver, for what they hide and for what they project, for how they are all used or rather misused, and exploited with an evangelical devotion.

Let me repeat, I love to hate colours.

2    

It happens every year. In a clock-work ritual, I go through a strange social experience every year, perhaps as the result of some sort of self-imposed social ostracism. The whole of India celebrates Holi, rejoicing the onset of spring.

Colours, gulals as they are known locally in India, are smeared and showered, pumped and hurled, all in ecstatic expressions of that joy. For years, I have been shying away from pichkaris, as the liquid colour-spewing hand-pumps are known locally. I have always hidden from colours and confined myself to my study the whole day on every Holi.

Of course, there is nothing unreligious about my aversion, it is all about the state of my mind and my psycho-medico relationship with colours. When will the world around me ever understand this?

At least there is one soul that understands me. That is Yours Truly. I understand myself, no two ways about it.

In a world that is so colour-driven, I know well all those influential people are chameleons, not loyal to any colour and ready to hop colours all the time.

I remarked to Vikram just the other day: As colours are treated as change-clothes, a colourful personality is just an euphemism today for an opportunistic individual, who is nothing but a consummate actor suitably painted for the occasion.

For days, these very words of mine continued to echo in my aural system. 

In a polychromatic world, monochrome personalities are looked down upon as dull, unimaginative and non-creative beings, unfit for a fast-paced social life.

If you are monochromatic, you are not even allowed to go near the social ladder, forget stepping on it. That hasn’t bothered me a wee bit.

Suddenly, I stood up with a couple of jerks, just like what dogs do after a nice long shower, shaking off all those oft-visiting thoughts. After all, this morning-thought sickness is my regular visitor these days.

Now, it was time for me to rush to my office. Hurriedly, I gathered my papers and files, stuffed them into my office bag, lingered at the doorsteps for a word from my wife Vidya before moving towards the car-park. Perhaps, she might have some errand for me to carry out on my way back home.

Again, my eyes transformed into a kaleidoscope of unpleasant colours with the memories of the past moving across, one at a time, like it happens in a grand slide-show.

It was 10 in the morning. I breezed into my office cubicle in The Commerce Chronicle with a story idea that had been brewing in my brain laboratory for a week.

I reached my cluttered desk after all those customary greetings and as usual flipped through   the day’s dailies from the competition.

For journalists like me, rituals like these are given. Sure, journalism today has been reduced to nothing more than a game of one-upmanship.

Colour, not the content, dictates the degree of upmarketness, or the elites-enchanting quality, of a publication in a fragile world of brittle make-believe.

As colours flip-flopped on the giant television screen on the panel facing me, I began crafting my story for the next day’s edition.

The story was all about the proposed merger between two corporations; and how the absorbing company and its stock were likely to be adversely affected by that merger, with a particular emphasis on the proposed merger’s humungous cost and its operational unsuitability to the absorbing company.

As I keyed in the last word of that statistics-packed analytical report, I was pleased as punch. In fact,