My Favourite Colour is Blue

It isn’t windy any more outside, like it used to be in October. It had also rained sometimes then. And at other times, they were the trees dancing. I do miss it all but that is not the reason I have been hesitating to press the ‘send’ button on my laptop screen. Yesterday, I was very excited about the idea of this summer project in biophysics. I typed the mail, made a CV and got the recommendations. The internet wasn’t working in the night, so I wasn’t able to mail it. But now, I am not sure if I want to. I mean, am I going to pursue that subject? If not, then this is totally useless. Sure it’s exciting and all. But useless.

What could be useful? Something that I like, that I’ll be committed to. But how do I know what I really like?

I like particle physics. I like Quantum. I like electronics. I like organic chemistry. I like genetics. I like ecology and evolution. I like thermodynamics. I like relativity. I like spectroscopy. I like cell biology. And systems biology.
And then my phone rings...

“Hey, it’s nice but it’s pink. No offence but you do know that we want to please people from both the genders alike. Think upon it. I know you like pink but, well, I’m sure you’ll come up with something better...err...something more universal?”
“I do not like pink! In fact I hate pink most of the times. It’s sickly sweet. BUT PINK LOOKS GOOD THERE. That’s the only reason it’s there and I do not want to change it!”
“Alright, alright. We’ll see about that. It comes as a shock though, that you don’t like pink. Anybody would have taken that for granted, seeing that a lot of your belongings are pink in colour. So what’s your favourite colour then? Blue? (Laughs)”
“Of course it IS blue. Those things are pink because they look good when they are pink. But they are not ALL the things.”
“Okay, chill! I’ll suggest you look around yourself and see how many of your things are actually blue in colour, and then decide the validity of your statement.”
“You are not telling ME what MY favourite colour is.”
“Right. The work at hand, think of an alternative. We want to avoid pink.”
Roger.

My roomie, at that time, was sending a mail for some astronomy-related project. Aah... Astronomy! Some cosy rack back home must still be filled with all the astronomy books I had bought in my 7th and 8th classes. It was infatuation. Pure romance, before I decided I wouldn’t become an astronaut, and after some more time, not an astronomer either. Did I ever DECIDE that? Hold on! I’ll have to go to flashback mode. Perhaps I’ll be able to find some kind of an answer.

I think it was back in class 2 when I and my then best friend, we had decided to become scientists. We called ourselves that, and we solemnly mixed muck, shampoo, sugar, leaves and the like, changing our formula every weekend, hoping to invent something extraordinary. She has moved to commerce now but I’m still on. What I realise is that she moved to commerce because she was thinking seriously. I never did.

I was scoring the highest marks in mathematics, so I loved the subject. Then, in middle school, I was doing well in history, far more than anyone else. This was when I briefly considered doing archaeology. I was so fascinated with Egypt and all that I went to the library everyday to look it up (I can assure you I have enough material to write a book on the topic). And during the classes, I doodled myself among the pyramids discovering some great secrets of the past, which I converted to some sort of games with my sister once I got home. I still like Egypt but I stopped thinking about archaeology ever since my dad told me a strict and justified ‘no’, and I knew what he was saying made sense even though I wished otherwise.

Thus was born the concept of ‘utility’. But my love for mysteries remained. Science, sort of, fit that bill. In any case, it was one of the very few professions I knew about, my dad being a scientist. And for reasons I do not understand, money-matters never seemed to bother me as much as they did the people around me. I lived in my own, blissful world. Perhaps I still do. Perhaps I have been pampered too much. I don’t know.

Academic achievements apart, I started performing very well in Physics, and I had always liked it too. It seemed so exciting, and more importantly, so true and perfect and beautiful. Now that I remember, I actually loved it! This newfound love and newfound confidence sustained itself through the next few years, till class 12, around which time it became a sort of overconfidence, and a consequent “under-confidence” after some exams. All for that elusive target, a good rank in some very hyped exam, and a good college. All the old romance of Physics was forgotten.

As of today, I find myself in a Science college. I am miles away from mathematics and I do not intend to go back. I like Physics but I do not know enough, my confidence wavers. I like Chemistry, I am good at it- but that’s only the theory part. I am good (well, that’s something relative) in Biology and I like it and I’ll go there eventually perhaps, but not now.

Although my interests have been changing over the past, at some given time it was something definitive. Now it’s not. That scares me. I want to hold on to my past interests, just like I’m holding on to “My favourite colour is blue”. Yes, my favourite colour used to be blue but there have been seasons of brown, seasons of green, seasons of black, seasons of maroon and seasons of violet. The pinks were sporadic, though. I do not remember why I used to like blue so much but yes, it’s good that I liked ‘something’ so that I could give a truthful answer to a trivial question.

Today, if you ask me what my favourite colour is, I will still reply without a thought: blue. Sometimes, life is easy when you have got no choices. You don’t need to worry about making a right one.

If you trust your sanity you will know that if you had once made a conclusion in your right mind (and not while you were experiencing some emotional spasm- this is where the problem is), you must have had some very good reasons. Failure to recollect or understand those reasons under present circumstances does not mean you must abandon that conclusion. On a paper full of variedly coloured splashes, you might not be able to locate that spot you could once see distinctly when the paper was white. But that spot, it is still there.

I need to find my blue among the subjects, that too before the fifth semester. Sometimes I think it does not matter what I choose because in whatever I choose, I’ll still look for what I have always been looking for and I know I’ll find it, no matter what it is. In fact, the choice might seem trivial after some years, but it bothers me now. Just like this hair falling over my face. Oh I just can’t wait for the stipend! I badly need a haircut. Meanwhile I’ll have to do with these hair bands. I have two hair bands: one blue, one pink. I’d bought the pink one for my sister but then decided to keep it. My wardrobe- just one pink top. Most of them are blue. There’s a lot of black too. And Maroon. My bed sheet, the notebooks upon it, the pen, the pen-stand, the files: they’re all some shade of blue.

Hey, I must really like blue.