Bright days

Lights, white lights, that’s what brightens us. Let’s see things in a good — white — light.
| Photo Credit: Getty Images/iStockphoto

Life in the 1980s was slow-paced. Like other children, we too enjoyed this leisurely rhythm. Everything around us moved slowly, a stark contrast to the fast-paced world of today’s swipe-and-gone YouTube shorts. It was as if everything around us was a long video playing in slow motion. We could watch a lizard chase a mayfly, one emerging victorious. A spider weaving its web in slow motion was a captivating sight. We could observe monsoon rainwater slowly rising to float our paper boats, only to recede moments later. Life was anything but fast. We could discern a rhythm in the endless flicker of tube lights and the neighbour’s milk-cooker whistle. Ad jingles were all by heart, and guessing ads when they started playing on a grainy Uptron B&W TV was a good pastime. We are a generation that did not skip ads; that was also content for us. Not only was life slow, but it was also remarkably quiet, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say calm. The Trivandrum City Corporation’s siren, blaring from 6 km away, was clearly audible.

This slow life in a small town in the 1980s came with perks. Perks of low voltage, unscheduled power cuts, water shortages, or even muddy water coming through the municipal supply. Incandescent bulbs were the most reliable way to light up your evenings. Tube lights — with a choke and starter — would light up only if the voltage was right. If the nearby welding shop continued to operate during the evening, our bulbs would dim further, showing their filaments clearly, like the nicely designed retro-styled Edison bulbs that you get these days. No wonder these bulbs remind me of a low-voltage past life. The closest we could achieve to white light luxury were those milky bulbs (not the LED ones you see today).

Somehow, due to factors mostly beyond our control, an endless supply of white light became associated with an aspirational urge. And the hate towards conventional bulbs and the yellow light kept building. In north Malabar, things were worse in comparison, and for many years that followed. You could see the incandescent bulb filament shyly lit up in the low-voltage supply. The joke — not really logical — was that if we were to break open the bulb and touch the filament, nothing would happen.

The man of the house — my grandfather — had the job of turning the knob of a device called Step Up, nothing but a step-up transformer. He would turn the knob to 1, 2, till 6 or so, at every dip in voltage. During vacations, children took turns to take over the stepping-up. Yellow light is still associated with scarcity, a scarcity of voltage. The other day, a Twitter user, at least a decade younger than me, tweeted about her generation’s love for yellow lights in the houses they set up, as opposed to having grown up in the white light era. The responses she got were broadly of two varieties: people with yellow light hated the past like me, and those who grew up in white-lighted homes. The first set — my types — hate yellows and yearn for whites, while the second find yellow lights warm, something I haven’t been able to come to terms with.

The hatred is not just for yellow or warm lights, as youngsters want us to call it. It’s even for darkness. Why else do I turn a light on when I plan to return home past sunset — I don’t want to walk into darkness and turn the lights on after walking in. Alexa can do that, or any of the home automation apps, but no — that’s overengineering. Yellow isn’t warm and cosy, darkness isn’t peaceful and calm. Lights, white lights, that’s what brightens us. Let’s see things in a good — white — light.

nikhilnarayanan@gmail.com