“Orange is red brought nearer to humanity by yellow.” – Kandinsky

Orange, he means, is vibrant, but shouts less than red. An aesthetic compromise for some colour schemes. Orange is the colour of the fruit with the same name, autumn leaves and the setting sun. And happiness and youth and monks and plastic buckets and fizzy drinks and pumpkins and tutti fruti. Personally, I wouldn’t like my corpse to be seen wearing it, but it has just been voted the colour of the millenium, according to some websites. It is a youthful colour: young monks look best in it?

Saffron is an Indian orange. Pinkish Orange is Salmon and an orange with little red in it is called Deep Yellow. Orange juice has lots of Vitamin C and is good for health and vodka. An Oranguatan is an orange ape but in funny coincidence, its name comes from Malay ‘Orang’ – ‘man’, and ‘utan’ – ‘wild.’ Orange is also the colour of desire, darling.

Frankly, I don’t know which colour is purple and which is violet. For me they are the same. I usually call the redder mix of blue and red purple and the bluer one violet. Until a friend told me that he thought it was vice versa. To confirm, I checked the dict, and found that voila, I was right! Purple can be a warm colour while violet is definitely cool.

European monarchs used to wear purple robes. Napoleon was known as Corporal Violet because he said he would return with the violets.

Purple in different contexts stand for bravery or sin or royalty. Or even spirituality.

“That purple-lined palace of sin.” - John Keats

“I would give you some violets, but they withered all when my father died.” - Ophelia in Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

Violets, in the language of flowers stand for innocence. “I would have given you violets, but you lot are guilty.”

Purple or Violet, for me, stands for grapes, eggplant and rubber stamp ink. A ‘purple patch,’ or ‘purple prose’ in literature, is a passage of over-ornate writing that makes you puke yellow. Purple speech is sleazy talk. Purple haze is a confused state or drugged stupor or both.

A white man bruises purple and goes ‘purple with rage.’ In the dictionary I have, a purple finch is “an American finch with red head and breast in the cock.” Being a decent chap, I got the clean meaning; you try.

‘Purple cow,’ like ‘pink elephant,’ is something peculiar and arresting. Sure, it is!

Indigo is purplish blue.

“Mauve? Mauve is just pink trying to be purple.” - James McNeill Whistler.

Other purples: plum, lavender, lilac, thistle, orchid, magenta, royal purple, amethyst, wine, pomegranate, eggplant, mulberry.

Brown is the colour of mud, wood, leather, skin, and clothes of kids coming in from play. It means earthiness, labour, and sometimes, simplicity or dullness. Brown doesn’t exist in the rainbow, it’s a mix of contrasting colours: green and red, or violet and yellow, or blue and orange. A brown-out is a partial black-out. Presents were wrapped in brown paper in the good old days. And brown sugar used to be unrefined sugar then. Sigh!

A brown jolly is brinjal, happily said. But I haven’t seen any brown brinjals in my life.

Copper is an orange brown, Tan is golden brown, and Beige is light brown. The Lady in Red is your date; the lady in beige is yo grandma! Sepia is the colour of those old brown photographs. Photographers used to bleach black and white photos and tint them with Sepia, to produce a colour closer to flesh than grey. They also used to tint the prints with watercolours those days. For browns, artists choose from Burnt Sienna, Burnt Umber, or just mix their own brown. You may mix black to red, yellow or green to get different browns.

Other browns: Bay, Sand, Wood, Sandalwood, Dapple, Auburn (what we used to call Audrey Hepburn), Chestnut, Nut-brown, Cinnamon, Russet, Tawny, Chocolate, Fawn, Mahogany, Oak, Bronze, Terra-cotta, Cocoa, Coffee, Hazel, Khaki, Puce, Snuff.

Friends and I were once waiting for another pal in a restaurant. Chap appeared at a distance wearing a brown shirt, which was a surprise to us; brown was a colour he hated. Then as he came closer, I saw that his shirt had red and green checks against yellow. The colours had optically mixed to produce brown! To know more about this phenomenon, read the ‘Art and Colour’ hub, like a good friend. (To be posted later; link will apear here.)

A brown is a copper coin. To be done brown is to be roasted or done in, cheated. Brown as a berry – why? What price blue berries or gooseberries? Dunno.

Uniforms in India are usually khaki. Factory workers, soldiers, policepersons, scouts… The British army in India in pre-independence times, who wore khaki, was responsible for this concept. Khaki seems to go in and out of fashion. Khaki jeans used to be fashionable in the early 1980’s. A brown-shirt is a Nazi. Browning is shoe polish or a famous poet. I’ll take the poet.

Brown used to mean shining from the Dutch ‘brun.’ As in “My bonnie brown sword,” or “brown as glass.” Brown as glass? I swear! “*@%!.” I swore. Maybe they meant beerbottles. Brown bottles protect the liquids inside from the UV rays of bright light. In fact, the beer in brown bottles is better preserved than beer in green or white ones. So buy your beer in brown bottles, don’t accept the ones on display and don’t expose the bottle to strong light.

If you’re in a brown study, you are in a vacant, depressed mood, staring at the wall. And a brownie is a little creature of Scottish fairy tales.