Black, White and all the shades in between..

Kanneganti, Chandra (Chandra.Kanneganti@fmr.com)
Wed, 16 Jul 1997 13:58:00 -0400 

seems to be the colors all the discussions on the seemingly simple query
acquiring.

I am still trying to recall if I ever saw a white person in all my life,
I mean white as in the surf advertisement  'aahaa Em telupu! iDleelanu
taladannE telupu!'   And with all the so called 'white' people obsessed
with getting barbecued (coated with appropriate doses of lotion) under
the Sun instead of using 'fairer and lovely' I don't hope to see one in
future too. 'Hey! where did you get that nice tan!' with an envious look
does convey to me that white isn't supreme color either.

I spent more than five years in Kentucky trying to see that divine blue
in that blue grass.  I suspect that I got successful at that on
occasional mornings after staring for a while and almost loosing the
sense of color with the help of my wife's hypnotic suggestions.  But
when I tried to find that blue shade in Aurther, my colleague from
Kenya, he wasn't that comfortable with my staring. I didn't find any
bluish tinge as far as I could see, but there might be a reason for it;
leave aside the divinity, he doesn't even have Microsoft stock.

Then if white isn't white and black isn't black, ( and just the
'chaamana Chaaya covering all the ground in between) it must be the
failure of all the languages, the languages that invented so many words
to convey the same meaning. May be C++ or JAVA may help here to analyze
and digitize these analogous colors between black and white and assign
each one of us with a color code. Life would be much simpler - solid
proof, yeah, I am 0.35, how about you?  At least my wife and mother
wouldn't fight any more on which one of our couple is fairer.

I know I digressed a lot and have to somehow connect to the group's
objective before our aadiguruvu (Pillalamarri gaaru - one of the first
graduates of our RECW) wakes up and catches me.

Yes, we do have bias against people who are black in our society, which
is only visible at marriages.  My neighbor may seem to be enjoying a
secret pleasure that her son-in-law is fairer than my other neighbor's,
but I know that she wouldn't demean in no manner but respect him in
accordance with our village standards. I can't think of any way to
convince people who show their affection by saying ' EmiTraa inta
nallabaDi pOyaavu?' that it isn't that less desirable to be black.

Regarding the Indians' feeling against the African Americans, a friend
of mine seem to be happy to be identified with them, taking advantage of
their affection poured at him due to his dark color.

Coming to the literature ( ammayya!), I don't remember the color of
koDavaTiganTi's 'kuroopi' but I remember reading a novel long long time
back about a black girl and her plight and abuses suffered due to the
black color. This could be a translation from other language and there
are some songs (shorter ones) like 'nalanallani juTTE telupaitE'.   We
have couple of characters in movies like 'chelleli kaapuram' and
'voorvaSi' but I don't know how the black color helped the story.

Chandra ' bias! how can be biased against bias!' Kanneganti