I don’t know who coined the ‘Yellow, yellow! Dirty fellow!’ lines. Whoever they are, I condemn them roundly. Coming up with rhyming lines is one thing, but giving a colour, a beautiful one at that, a bad name, is quite another. Just not done, sir/ma’am. Just Not Done.

When little children, or even the not so little ones, draw the sun, they colour it a bright yellow shade, with a bit of orange thrown in and also yellow ochre… oh well, let’s keep that for the painting class. For now, I’ll stick to just the yellow. It looks so pretty on the sun, the bright yellow, does it not? And so cheerful too.

What about the sunflowers whose gaze follow the sun? The huge flowers with their beautiful yellow petals and the contrasting brown centres are a visual delight. So are the flowers of the golden shower tree which bursts into bloom during the hotter months. The copperpod trees too have pretty yellow flowers, though of a different shade.

Then there are yellow lilies, yellow daisies, yellow dahlias, yellow tulips, yellow roses, yellow chrysanthemums, yellow marigolds, and more, each a different shade of the colour. Oh! How can one forget the yellow daffodils immortalised in verse by the poet Wordsworth? I would not like to leave out the little known ones growing wild, breathtakingly beautiful nonetheless. Even the yellow of the leaves cheers one up, such is the magic of the colour!

When the colour yellow so obviously symbolises joy and cheer, how did it get itself associated with cowardice? Is it because fear makes you turn pale? And what of yellow journalism, the publishing of sensationalised news with lurid details? How did this lovely colour end up having such an unsavoury connection as that? On the other hand we do have yellow papers which are documents containing research that has not yet been formally accepted, which I must say lends some sort of dignity to the colour. Small mercies.

Here’s something that I did not know, though it didn’t shock me as such as the author would have it. What it did was merely make me go, ‘Cool!’

“If you take blue paint and yellow paint and you mix them, you get green paint. But if you take blue light and yellow light and mix them, you get white light. This is a shock to most people.”
~ James Turrell

Here’s something else that someone unknown has said: “The sun and a yellow crayon have something in common – they both brighten our days.” Spot on! They do brighten up our day, much as the yellow dress someone wears cheers up those around. And yet…. right now I wish the sun wouldn’t be such a workaholic and would instead take an off, go on a holiday some place and let the dark clouds take their turn in the sky for a few days. The heat is killing!

Meanwhile, here are some pretty yellows from my collection:

©️ Shail Mohan 2024