Monday, November 22, 2010

Which colour do you 'need'

IIPM BBA MBA Institute: Student Notice Board

Ever wondered why the colour of money is usually green and workplaces are often painted blue and yellow? And why black is not a colour for an auspicious occasion while red is the choice of colour for most brides? Aakriti Bhardwaj sets out to find if interpreting colours correctly will indeed lead us to the pot of gold that lies at the end of the rainbow.
AAKRITI BHARDWAJ

While driving back from work one day, I heard an RJ on a radio channel dishing out advice to people for various problems through the usage of colours. A caller rang in and said, “I’m in love with this girl, who is my boss. She is going to London in 10 days and I need to tell her that I love her and I don’t want her to go.” The on-air colour therapist cum RJ Rochie Rana advised him to use red, pink and purple in his office. The week after, I tuned in again to find out about the fate of Mr Romeo. He apparently had walked up to his girl and proposed. “I think even I love you,” was the reply the lucky man received! But how could mere colours make someone fall for a person? Desperate to figure out how colours can fix our problems, I fixed an appointment with Rochie Rana, a colour therapist, pranic healer and an ex-radio jockey.

“There are two ways to look at colour therapy,” said Rochie, my shepherd for the day, lounging on a chair in a cafĂ© sporting a black attire and sipping on a yellow drink. “One is colour therapy that originated along with ayurveda. In India, the principle was really simple, they understood colours affect people. Brides always wore red, that was colour therapy because they understood that red is the colour of sexual desire. It is the colour of bonding sexually, as in ancient India there were arranged marriages, so it helped women to feel more comfortable. They wore henna on their hands, as yellow is the colour which stopped them from feeling tired and helped cool their nerves as they worked in the kitchen and in the field. This is the Indian version, which started with ayurveda and it became really big while colour therapy was left behind. Then came Pythagoras (the man behind the Pythagoras theorem), who understood that every colour has a wavelength and every wavelength of every colour was constantly hitting your mind and giving you certain messages, and it had an effect on your mind, body and soul. Green was a natural master healer. Colour therapy is very old but Pythagoras actually is the man who gave colours their vibrational modalities, and therefore made it very scientific.”

Colour therapy is often criticised, for the placebo effect alone may help heal some patients. “You can verify it” Rochie said with a defensive look that stemmed from her love for her art... sorry science! “It’s empirical. Pythagoras said there are vibrational modalities. It is certified by doctors across the world. There are psychological institutes that dwell upon colour therapy. The University of Massachusetts always stands by the effect of colours on marketing and sales. For instance, no restaurant will have insufficient red or orange because those are the colours that make you want to eat. We don’t work on placebo effect. Which colour do you 'need' Colours have an effect even on those people who don’t believe in them. What I do is purely scientific. It is no voodoo, it is science. Colour therapy is not restricted to emotional and physical pain, I have cured people of migraine, hepatitis and by combining it with pranic healing, I’ve brought back people from the last stage of cancer!”

On a table in front of me, she then laid eight cards, each of a different colour. I was to pick one card at a time, whichever I was attracted to, and then flip it over and continue the drill with the rest of the cards. Each card had a number written on the other side, which became Rochie’s reference number. This process was to be done twice.

So I flipped each card one by one. Orange attracted me the most, green, blue and pink followed, next was the very bright yellow, and brown, black and grey were the last in my list. The second time the sequence was slightly altered. My therapist then did some math while I finally decided to look at the menu.

“You are a very emotional person and right now you are sort of emotionally distressed...” she’d begun. And as she continued, I was dumbstruck by the accuracy in her judgement of my current situation. I felt as if I had been shown a mirror, and it had reflected thoughts, which had perhaps been buried deep within me, things I never had the courage to face. She told me that I wanted to break away from personal or professional ties as they were making me unhappy. If I continued pushing myself, she warned that it could become a much larger problem. I asked her for solutions and she gave me three simple things to do for 14 days. On the eighth day itself, I could feel the difference. Today, I am more sorted and I have my priorities right. No wonder when we are sad, browns and greys seem to hold the maximum appeal and in happier times we invariably end up picking reds, purples and pinks. Try wearing a bright colour when feeling gloomy, it might surprise you by bringing that smile back! Which colour do you 'need' Colour Quotient
by Rochie Rana

For relationships:
Keep pink, purple and red close to yourself. It’s a myth that red makes you aggressive. A 100% exposure to red would make you aggressive. But red is for a very active, healthy and romantic relationship. Purple is for a very soulful relationship, I usually suggest it for couples who’ve been married really long and have lived out their sexual inclinations and are now trying to connect at a higher level.

To soothe or calm oneself:
Go for a lot of indigo and a little bit of blue. Always use only a hint of the colours; if you use a 100% blue, you are likely to feel depressed. Colours have contraindications as well. Too much of one colour can result in trouble.

Health:
Stay in the pink with green. Hospitals across the world use the colour green. It is considered as nature’s master healer. For example, if your blood pressure is low and your friend’s blood pressure is high, and if you are both exposed to green for seven minutes or more, both of your blood pressures will become normal!

For studies:
Yellow. This is the colour that increases concentration by 80%. So, if you are writing on a legal pad, chances of you remembering what you have written are 80% higher. But don’t overdo yellow, like wearing yellow, seeing yellow and writing on yellow, unless you want diarrhoea!

Physical pain:
Treat pain with green. Put some oil in a green glass bottle or cover a glass bottle with a green cellophane paper and keep it out in the sun for seven hours. This solarised oil can be used wherever there is pain for 14 days. Green is the only colour that doesn’t have side-effects. You can use as much of it as you want. You could also drink solarised water twice a day.

Prosperity and wealth:
Green, orange and purple. Technically, the colour of prosperity is green because the colour of money is green. Purple is a very good colour to bring in money as well and so is orange.

Workplace:
Yellow and orange at workplaces is good. Yellow is particularly good for people in creative jobs because it makes you think faster and think out of the box. Orange helps one push the envelope. It keeps you energised.

Combating negative thought:
If someone’s feeling negative, jealous, envious or angry, happy colours like white and purple should be used. A lot of people who have a lot of negative energy are not attracted to these colours as it repels them.

Business meetings:
If you are wearing black you are not going to get intimidated in a meeting. You would look dignified, feel confident, secure and be more assertive.

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Source : IIPM Editorial, 2010.

An Initiative of IIPM, Malay Chaudhuri and Arindam chaudhuri (Renowned Management Guru and Economist).

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