What’s Wrong With Beige?

Inspired by The Giver, a beloved book of mine, and Color Lovers.

 By: Bint Khalid

Jonas lives in the world of Sameness. A community where members express no emotion, everyone is unfailingly polite and there are no attachments. They all look the same, they all think the same, they all feel the same. Individuality does not exist and if one is not adjusted appropriately then they are shamefully let go and ‘released’. It is a machine of a society devoid of color. Except for Jonas, who begins to see flashes of color, especially the color red, and gradually starts to experience real emotions, upon whence he decides to outcast himself in order to enjoy a truer and colorful life, where otherwise Sameness would not allow.

You cannot help but draw a parallel between Lois Lowry’s fictional society in The Giver and the real deal. The general blandness of today becomes distinct in one’s mind as you flip through the pages. Ask me how.

Well I cannot pinpoint a one specific cause, but in an attempt to haphazardly dissect the issue of our color faded world let us drag a few thoughts on to the white laminate table top and under the lamp. Rubbing gloved hands together, picking up a dissecting knife, and under the magnifying glass…

Right there you will notice…

How nowadays people are consumed with the quantity of their moments rather than the more important quality, living in an unfortunate state of distractedness, anxiety and a shunning of empathy, gradually becoming unresponsive to life’s colors. In such a state, it appears that time is managing people as they are increasingly connected to the clock, and are often found wondering “where did my day go?”. The concept of the rat race is carved in many a brain and the image of the overworked ruthlessly competitive urban individual, whose success is measured by his bank account balance, comes to mind, and I can feel the colors diming.

May I suggest the homogeneity of culture as a cause for a colorless world society? The escalating loss of diversity and the over-promotion of standardization in most aspects are likely to blame. The most obvious case is the nowadays rare authentic coffee place, like the hundred year old shop in Alexandria, Egypt, where they would generously roast and grind your coffee at the spot and right in front of you, freshly brewed to your liking. Or the one in Queenstown, New Zealand, that serves a special homemade cake for every day of the week. Except now with internationalized franchises you will find the same everywhere and that everywhere is the same, resembling the colorless community of Sameness. Shouldn’t each culture stick to its colors? Apply this homogeneity of culture to other aspects, like architecture, interiors, music, language, clothing, or even agriculture and you will see color carefully walking out the back door. The cloning of capitalist wisdom is apparent wherever you go and finding a truly authentic experience today will be an invaluable gem that someone will surely snatch and commercialize faster than you can blink. You are tempted to blame globalization, but is it completely so?

Then again we greet a creeping black and white landscape when social values and paradigms are found disintegrating and the gap between old and young is amplified by the smallest things, from who your role model is, to dress codes, to personal priorities and goals, to spirituality, to, to, to, to….

There is the obsession with the immaterial. But let us veer away from the individual and look at society at large where the most noticeable illustration is modern construction that is bulldozing pieces of history in its attempt to ‘beautify’ a city, which some might consider a supreme example of a loss of direction and a broken compass. One might possibly contemplate the idea that the quality of development ought to be superior to the quantity and size of such development.

This brings us to another related and valid notion for the existing surplus of monochrome souls, and that is our disconnectedness from the natural world. The hectic lifestyle of our contemporary existence and our submergence in superfluous indulgences has turned us away from what intuitively induces calm in the human spirit, an innate connection with nature that we seem to disregard. If you look at Qatar’s natural setting and climate, it is a harsh one, where the nomadic desert people of old, who were rough and robust, succumbed to wind, sun, sand, more sun and more sand. Their choices in color were limited to those of the natural world around them – brown, beige, black, white – as they fed off the land and used the leather and coats of their livestock, which sadly never came in peach or turquoise.

Us on the other hand, we are not as rugged and yet we attempt to resist and defy Qatar’s lawful natural environment. Not only that but we attempt to transform and convert what is the natural locale to something which it is not. But no matter how much one is immersed in modern life, fooling one’s self and striving to ignore the reality of one’s location, you will be incessantly reminded by some small matter that you are still in a dictating desolate desert. For instance, notice that no matter what you do, whether you place a newly bought object, paint a house, re-upholster, or whatever it may be, as long as it is out there, and as long as it’s not already beige, eventually, surely, its color will take on the color of the sand. Its color will fade and it will become that dull beige that everything somehow is bleached to in this place.

Then again, fortified in our fine homes, the slightest wind will allow miniscule particles of dust to seep in. Through closed doors, windows, within the smallest crevices and the most insignificant places, like magic, small sand will welcome itself into your home and swathe everything you own. Your shiny utensils, colorful flowerpots, expensive furniture and curtains, and your top-of-the-line gadgets? All under a maddening layer of Qatari dust that peeks at you smugly. Thus you are reminded in half a second where you really are, minus the self-deluded city. It is amusing but sad as we fail to remember how a person’s attachment to nature (the desert in our case) has guaranteed healing powers on the soul, yet we submerge ourselves in modern life’s demanding frantic state.

So now then, as we push away from our mini lab setting we can conclude from our rushed analysis the following: that while colorblindness in some is genetic in many others it seems to be an acquired condition.

And I am left to wonder: what is the color of your mind?

As for myself?

Although I deem myself a person with no ‘favorites’ (it’s amazing how some find this strange), ironically, I love the color grey. Generally colors that are ‘liars’ are the best in my opinion, because they are neither this color nor that color, in one light they seem a certain color and in another light they seem some other. If you look at it long enough and ask it “exactly what are you?” it will gaze back at you silently and then maybe say “I’m not sure myself”. Identity crises? Chameleon? That’s my color. Like beige.

…………………………………………………………………

Interesting related sites:

Is Life Really A Rat Race, by Paul Su.

World In a Grain of Rice, by Vandana Shiva.