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Wednesday,
October 10, 2001, Chandigarh, India 
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INSIDE VIEW Of
changing role models & new values
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INSIDE
VIEW
With Divali round the corner, it’s time to make a splash of colour in your home and give your dull and drab walls a facelift. After all, what better than freshly painted walls to get you into the right mood for the festival season? The importance of colours in enhancing your surroundings cannot be underestimated. The great German poet and novelist Goethe was a known colour theorist. He was particularly interested in what he called the "moral" effect of colours, or what we would call their sensuous, psychological, and emotive effects. Goethe believed that when a person perceives colours, he or she does not simply take in data in the raw sense, but builds in a whole complex of psychological experiences. We know about the energising effects of reds, oranges and yellows, the pacifying effect of colours of which blue is a component, and especially the mysterious and disturbing quality of purple, which is, not a pure spectrum colour at all. But to identify schematically the "moral", sensuous, and emotive qualities of colours is far from easy. One can disguise irregularities or alter the whole feeling of space in as short a time as it takes to paint or cover walls. What are the options before you when you decide to repaint your old home or paint a new one? There are numerous kind of brands like Allscapes, Nerolac, Snowcem, Ascian, Garware, Genson and Nicholsen, etc, to name a few, in the market. There are textured paints like Spectrum, Allteck, Heritage etc, that can be used both for exteriors and interiors. Oil-bound distempers are commonly used for the interiors also. The cost of these applications varies between Rs 7 and Rs 25 per sq ft in the textured paint category, and around Rs 5 for normal paints. It is best for living rooms to have a mix of textured and plain paints to add a bit of rhythmic hues. Do not be too frivolous while experimenting with textures for bedrooms and study rooms. They are more at home with the greys and whites of plain paints. Blue, maroon, deep green shades, and light orange hues go very well in them. Colours are directly related with the ambient light. Consult experts—interior designers or architects—to determine which shade will best be applicable to which room. The use and application of colour does not mean the absence of white and its shades. The Taj Mahal is pure white, and so are many religious buildings and monuments. In fact, our living areas must be dignified, full of class rather than have absurd colours that will only make the interiors worse. A dash of orange or blue or a tinge of yellow placed on the right wall in an otherwise grey-coloured building will leave the viewer wonderstruck. In any case, the residential areas must have their ceilings in white. Floorings must be correlated with the shades to be finalised, the hues created may be very different altogether from what was imagined. Greys and camels can hardly fail to give a cool and pleasant back-ground. They are the most malleable of colours. They can be used by themselves in a build-up of interesting textures. They can also act as unifiers for vibrant colours, to cool and calm them down. All too often people go from one extreme to another in bedroom decorations, doing up so-called feminine rooms on the one hand, and pastel-coloured rooms on the other hand. A subtle theme must prevail in the total atmosphere, it is also advisable to use the colour chart to mix and match. Bathrooms are always the most rewarding of the rooms to decorate. Even if they seem at first glance to be entirely irredeemable there is always something that can be added to make them look better. Giving darker shades is better, the latest trend being providing decorative wall papers and leafy vinyl floors. Kitchens are more personal than any room to the housewife. Small geometrics in good strong colours can impart a gallic air even to the most boring of kitchens. Experiments with majenta, ochre yellow, and purple have proved successful. Ever seen black in a kitchen? It might sound gloomy, but it looks smart and may hide a multitude of constructional faults in the buildings. These days Vaastu and Feng Shui are breaking down buildings rather than making a few. Vaastu gives a few tips that say that buildings facing a certain direction must be in a specific colour, like an apartment facing south-east must be white or off-white. South-facing buildings must be red, or pink. It is best to leave this study right here, at least in terms of its application to colours. Nothing should and nothing can govern the particular colour to be used by a person other than his intuition and psyche. Ever noticed that the residents of Chandigarh live with brick reds and greys, while Panchkula has more vibrant (read gaudy) colours inside and outside and Mohali offers more whites and pinks.? It could be an analytical study in itself. Colours nevertheless seem to have a broad symbolic reference to feelings. We may not be able to find accurate one-to-one matches between a specific colour and a specific feeling. The job of the user in exploiting the palette is not just to enhance the appeal of artifacts but to differentiate and weave together feelings. So some insight is needed into the "palette" of feelings in relation to the palette of pigments. Experiment with colours,
happy living and happy celebrating!
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Of changing
role models & new values
Ideally, a hero should embody qualities of valour, intellect, strength, romance, idealism, justice and goodness. These are the values that are embodied in the mythologies or great literary works of any culture — Ulysses of Homer’s Odyssey, Julius Caesar of Shakespeare’s great play of the same name. The ‘greatest Indian superhero’, of course, is Maryada Purushottam Lord Rama, who knew just where to ‘draw the line’, closely followed by Lord Krishna, who changed the definition of the ‘line’ a little. Lord Krishna was the great romantic, the great statesman, the great philosopher, the great warrior, and the great philanthropist. Definitely, his motivations were more political than those of Lord Rama. Brought up on the legends of these two ‘superheroes’, who advocated certain values, the modern-day Indian has to come to terms with the fact that although, ideally, he should admire persons who embody these values, he admires other types. The most typical example is that of Mahatma Gandhi, who manifested all the estimable Indian virtues of tolerance, non-violence and asceticism, to name a few. But ironically, people, who claim to hold him in esteem, wouldn’t like their children to emulate him. Says Col J.B. Singh, "I adore the ideals that the Mahatma lived for, but no, I would definitely not like my son to model his life on Gandhi’s. In today’s world, success is counted by material achievement. The other aspect to this is that if I were to incorporate these qualities in my children, it would be doing them a vast disservice because turning the other cheek just doesn’t pay these days. I would rather that my son were the striker than the stricken". Which brings us to the question of who are the heroes of today? Who are the role models preferred and venerated, and admired by the Chandigarh society? Amitabh Bachchan, of course, tops the list of superheroes. "One always admired him as a performer", says Rita Ghai, a teacher, "but his Phoenix-like re-emergence has made him really special. Can’t think of a single such person in modern India who, from the heights of success, sunk to the depth of despair and failure and then rose again to reach a pinnacle. He is the one person who commands respect and admiration of all sections of society." Is goodness the quality that people are looking for in their role model? "Not exactly", says Shefali Kapur, college student. "I think strength is the most important thing I would look for, and the fighting spirit and endurance to go after what one wants. My role models are Shabana Azmi, Kiran Bedi, Arundhati Roy and Maneka Gandhi. They are my role models because they’re achievers in their own fields and in addition, they fight for the causes they believe in. These could range from talking on AIDS or fighting for rehabilitation of displaced villagers or animal activism. The main thing is that they stand up and make themselves heard and I think that they do make a difference. Besides, their achievements are all the more significant because they are women with a social conscience". "Jhansi ki Rani and Indira Gandhi are my ideals. Not only does one empathise with them, being a woman oneself, but one admires their grim determination and strong fighting spirit, all the more significant in a completely male-dominated world. Also, their guts to step into the political arena, which has been almost absolutely male-dominated’’, says Madhurima, a playwright. Says Asha Sharma, an executive, "The people I admire are those who started with nothing but are huge industrialists today. People like Dhirubhai Ambani, Oberoi of the Oberoi group of hotels and even Gulshan Kumar. These are men who started with modest enterprises and became scions of Indian industry. The quality I admire most is the sense of enterprise and making the most of every opportunity that may present itself. In the same sense, I admire Phoolan Devi... look at where she came from and what she had achieved when her life ended. Whatever one might think of the Indian electorate for making her an MP, the fact remains that she, herself, was a major achiever". "I admire people who are gifted in one way or another and have been able to cash in on those gifts... people like M.F. Husain, Lata Mangeshkar, Sachin Tendulkar. There must be thousands of playwrights, singers, or sportsmen in the city alone, maybe even better than those I’ve named, but who knows them?" asks Rajendra Tyagi, a dentist. Joti Singh, a Sociologist,
University of Winston Salem, North Carolina, currently visiting the city,
summarises this trend, "In a country which has developed so fast
materially over the past two decades, it’s only natural that the perception
of what is the desirable quality should shift from the spiritual to the
material. Any person who, on the one level, attains material success, and on
the second, is media savvy enough to let others know about it, is a hero
today".
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Who
is a hero? One would say that a hero is a person whom others admire because of
his deeds, intellect, achievement or character, whom the common man would like
to emulate, but probably find hard to do. In short, a hero or a role model is
capable of those actions or qualities that a person who admires him is lacking.