George Menezes

MANY years ago, too many to count on my fingers and toes, I was on a training assignment in the USA. In a place called Bethel in the State of Maine, better known more for its lobsters than for its training programmes.
We were a small group working in what is known as a “behavioural sciences lab”. I have never been colour conscious in my life, but the unbelievable “goings on” in our colleges in Mumbai right now jogs my memory into remembering that except for a black-as-night American, I was the only non white in that group.
If there was any discrimination it seemed to be in favour of the darker men. I was therefore not surprised when a white woman in the group made a pass at me. She sent me a cutting from a newspaper that said, “Bald is beautiful!” To which she had added in ink, “Dark and bald is even more beautiful”.
Over a dry martini that evening, I thanked her for doing more for my self-esteem than the training “lab” which was specially designed to tear a person down bit by bit in honest confrontation and get him to learn to build his own self-esteem.
Those were the years when Americans were going gaga over Yul Bryner’s shining dome and people like me were benefiting from the “fall-out”. The pun is not intentional.
I decided that evening over my third drink, that come what may I would never wear a wig nor wear a mask to hide my feelings. Both decisions have brought me joy and, as one would expect, endless pain.
I posted the cutting to my wife who was busy showering her attention on our curly headed son back home.. I did not hear from her till I landed at Sahar Airport. There she was, a beautiful dazzling white smile accentuating a jet-black dress that she wore with grace and dignity.
In her hand she carried a newspaper cutting that said, “Black is beautiful”. What it meant to say was “anything you can do I can do better”.
Black has always been our favourite colour. A light blue “dupatta” over a black “kameez”, a black tea-table cloth with red serviettes to match, a black kurta or Chinese collar shirt and we are in fashion. In fact we are in fashion even at funerals.
But suddenly, black has become the colour of violence. And in the compounds of cherished educational institutions where the number of policemen outnumber the students, black tar that should have been poured onto our pot-holed roads, is being poured over the faces of people whose only crime is that they chose a profession that is meant to grow roses in the mind-gardens of our children, and will not bend their knees to demands for admissions by political Parties.
And all the while, our law-enforcers and we citizens watch and do nothing. Young people pouring tar over the faces of college principals, I am told, is not a crime that demands police intervention even when the perpetrators have their photographs in every newspaper.
Bernard Shaw once wrote, “Youth is such a beautiful thing. Why do we waste it on children”.
I believe he hated the colour black as much as I hate it now.