Grey and its many shades! No, this has nothing to do with 50 Shades of Grey and its protagonist Christian Grey and his twisted sexual fantasies. I am talking about the colour grey here – the dull, drab grey that we abhor, and eventually learn to accept. For, we realize there is much more to grey – it can be threatening, melancholic, conflicting and even enigmatic – there are many shades of grey!

When we are younger, we like bright and happy colours – red, yellow, green, orange, pink. Who wants dull grey? We can deal with the clarity of black and white, but grey confounds us. It’s neither back nor white, neither here nor there. We can’t put it in a box. It defies any definition. For black and white has merged to create grey. And not just one grey, many shades of greys!

For a long time, I avoided grey. I found the colour boring, sometimes confusing. I was all for happy colours, all for clarity. I wanted definite answers. For me, it was either right or wrong, no in-betweens. I either liked something or somebody or I didn’t, and I what didn’t like, I ignored. I made no effort to be nice to people who didn’t match up to my standards. I would rather be alone than be with people I didn’t care about. My friends, who knew me better, called me reserved. But not everyone was as kind. Most people found me snobbish. But that somehow didn’t bother me, as long as I had clarity.

Things changed once I entered the world of work. I realized I couldn’t ignore a person just because I disliked them, no matter how valid my reasons maybe. You could probably get away with it in some spheres of life. But in my profession that involved dealing with people, it was impossible. So, I learnt to get along with people irrespective of whether I liked them or not. I did so grudgingly at first, then eventually got used to it. I realized that it didn’t make me fake; it made me a better person. I was less dismissive and judgemental.

Then the little boxes defied me. The right and the wrong, the good and the bad, the light and the dark, and so many other opposites that I compartmentalized often got jumbled. Things got even more entangled when emotions entered the equation, all those ‘Love me, love me not’ moments. The conflicting sentiments confounded me. I would be perplexed, sometimes depressed, not knowing how to deal with them. Until I realized it was impossible to put things in different boxes. The greys are for real, as real as black and white.

And not all greys are dull. There’s romantic grey like a monsoon day that brings silver rain or the enigmatic grey of the evening sky that merges with the night. Grey can be threatening, grey can be looming and uncertain, but once we learn to deal with greys, it’s not that bad. Grey is a mature colour that teaches us to accept life as it comes!