Nothing really changes overnight with a century passing by or with a millennium ending. But we all have our little rituals to mark out our niches in the continuous flow of time. That is why a calendar, the dance and drink to bid farewell to the old year, the card to celebrate the New Year. It is all an effort at dividing time, most of the time purely for our own convenience.So why mock at all the elaborate plans the rich and famous are making for the millennium-end night. There is, after all, a thrill in being witness to a thousand years on a calendar passing away at midnight. And not just the rich and the famous. There are others too who have plans of another kind and who are seeking a moment of salvation for what they must have held dear and precious in a given slot of time.Just the other day a diehard Marxist announced happily that the BBC had declared Karl Marx man of the millennium. Even if it be a case of holding on to what the world rejected in a big way toward the end of the century, thisbeliever has decided to print a picture of Marx on New Millennium cards with the slogan `Man of the Millennium'.This is no obituary but his way of carrying forward into the next millennium a man, mind and ideology which may yet find takers in the times to come. Many are the examples which can be given in support of such wishful thinking. When the Buddha died, there were just four or five followers around him. But today Buddhism has its followers all over the world. So there is hope yet for the Colour Red in the times to come. Or so they would like to believe.But there's much to do with how this colour is applied. For colours are, after all, mixed with brains and applied with technique. Make a mistake and time will lay it bare. A very interesting story to this effect was related by politician-painter V.P. Singh who has been showing his works in the Capital this month. As a young man, he was asked by an army officer in the bachelors' mess at Kirkee if he would blow up a small picture of a luscious beautyin red panties. ``I said I would do it, for as a painter it was just another subject,'' recalls the former prime minister. Well, he did it and the pin-up became very popular, with young officers taking turns in putting it up in their rooms.So it circulated for a long time. While this anecdote was being related, one admirer asked, ``Where would it be now?'' To this, Singh's reply was: ``I have no idea whether it still exists or not. But while I still had news of it, I was told that something terrible had happened. The red colour of the panties had faded. It had turned grey.'' For the artist this was a lesson, and he took pains to learn about colours and their application so that they would not do the vanishing trick again.This funny tale is all about art material and its application. But the fading of the colour red has its ideological implications too. Right through the Sixties, we had poets celebrating this colour. And later screaming out in verse that this colour was endangered. I recall a poem by aMarxist poet of Hindi, Kumar Vikal. The poem was called Rang Khatre Mein Hain (The colours are threatened). In it he had warned about a conspiracy against the favourite colour of the masses. This, he said, was happening for people were mixing the colours by indiscriminately adding green, blue and yellow to the Colour Red and the result was a dark and ugly hue.Coming again to the pin-up girl painted long ago for an officer in Kirkee mess, wasn't there something prophetic and symbolic about the red of the panties fading away? But the faithful among the faithless is quick to refute this, ``The Colour Red fades only when applied on a pin-up.'' Only time can tell if it be so. For time has the power to console, change and aveng.
