The colours of tranquility

One of the things that so differentiates the urban from the rural is colour.

What are the colours of a city? If you stop to think about it, there's no such thing. The city is a chaos of colour. Hoardings, cars, buses, people, houses, exhaust. The eye does not once focus on any one colour.

Here on the other hand, there are three distinct colours that dominate the landscape. Whenever I am away and I think of this place, it is the sense impression made by these colours that come to mind.

There is green, of course. Countless shades of green, from bright, almost fluorescent greens to dark sombre greens, from yellowish greens to olive, lemon, jade, emerald and you-name-it greens. Green that is always lush and, in the rains, almost mesmerizing. Not surprising since it is the trees and the endless wild vines and plants that stand out most.

Then there is brick-red. This is the colour of the earth here, a colour you see a lot of since much of the ground is covered only by trees or fields. It is also the colour of the stone blocks that are used for building. Even though many homes have plastered walls, the burnt red of the cheera, as it is called, is still seen in abundance, often fusing with the ground so that some homes and boundary walls look as if they have sprung directly from the earth.

And above all this is blue, the endless expanse of cloudless calm skies touching the horizon and merging into the blue of the ocean.

Green, they say, is most soothing to the senses. And green and red in conjunction, as anyone who has studied colour knows, are complimentary colours and therefore most harmonious and pleasing to eye. Blue too is the colour of tranquility: of space and quietness.

There is a certain beauty in these colours, and much of this beauty comes from the fact that the natural landscape often seems to have the harmony otherwise seen only in an artist's work. If only artists could decide the colour scheme of cities, how beautiful they would be.

Sometimes I think the environmentalists and doomsday prophets are right. Man will ultimately destroy all natural beauty.

As the poet Primo Levi writes:

We, rebellious progeny
With great brainpower, little sense,
Will destroy, defile
Always more feverishly.
Very soon we'll extend the desert
Into the Amazon forests,
Into the living heart of our cities,
Into our very hearts.