Towards a coloured sky

I recently watched ‘The sky is pink’, a touching reel life portrayal on the real life journey of Aisha Chaudhary and her family through her battle with a life threatening disorder.

 

This, however, is not a review.

This is about that one line that stayed with me all through the movie and then some more.
This is about ‘Moose’ (aka Priyanka Chopra) sharing an emotional moment with her onscreen son, wherein he complains to her about being rebuked by his school teacher and mocked by the other kids. Reason being; he had coloured the sky pink in his kindergarten drawing book.

That is when Moose tells him that he shouldn’t worry about it because contrary to what the teacher says, he wasn’t wrong.

“We are all given a piece of sky,” she says, mentally defending the choices she has made in her life.  “If you think the sky is pink, then it IS pink.”

That for me for much more than an ‘aww’ moment. What Moose said there was something I have always wished for, believed in, and to a great extent stuck by. Making the best out of the bit of sky that has been allotted to me.

Yet, a burning question remains...how do we colour to our heart’s content if society with its limited mentality makes sure our colour palette is limited too.
There is black and white, and a few other primary colours. But try and dip your brush in grey, or a few blended shades, and it will alienate you, ostracise you, make you feel like you don’t belong.
It’s a tale as old as time. Ideas are met with resistance. Creativity is challenged.  Bravado is mocked. Vincent Gogh, Oscar Wilde, Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi, all revolutionaries in their own rights, had to suffer strong criticism for their views, each in their own field. Even today, so many years later, the risk their modern day contemporaries have to face has only gotten worse.

Sometimes, I wonder how our skies would have been had we been offered a larger palette of colour.
I am sure everybody would have so much more to create, to display, to share.
But no! We have become a society of restrictions and rules. And breaking any of these laid down fundamentals is considered sacrilege.

So we stay within the limits that are drawn for us. We colour inside the lines. We laugh at different...discourage creativity...misinterpret genius.
And deem a pink sky preposterous...

We coerce ourselves into accepting that a sky of any colour other than blue will never find its rainbow. We keep reiterating it to ourselves...until it finally becomes our thought. Our belief. Our mindset.

Well, what we need is to change that mindset...to be inspired by the rebels...to break the stereotype, one step at a time.
For now, let’s start with ourselves. Let’s paint our bit of sky with the colour of our choice.
If our palette is not equipped with the hue we desire, let’s create it. Mix, match, bleed, blend—-until you achieve the perfect shade you always desired.
For complacency has to be broken.
For change has to begin somewhere...sometimeAnd if not now, when!

Ask me, and I’d choose alternating shades of purple and yellow to colour the canopy of my sky.
How would you paint your firmament?