What Color Ink Do You Use?
A journey through color, choices, conformity — and one unforgettable purple suit.
When we were children, life came in boxes of crayons — usually Camlin Camel crayons, or Luxor if your parents were feeling indulgent (and willing to spend a little extra). Twelve if your parents were practical. Twenty-four if they were generous. Forty-eight if they believed you had artistic potential.
You started by colouring a ball or a large flower — maybe red, maybe yellow, maybe a mix of both. Then came the sky, which didn’t have to be blue, and the tree, which didn’t have to be green. You experimented, blended, smudged, erased, tried again. Sometimes the grass was purple, the sun streaked with orange and pink, the clouds wearing every colour in the box. You coloured in the lines. You coloured outside the lines. You mixed shades that weren’t on the label. You did what looked good to you. Nobody complained. In fact, they called it creativity.
For me, there was a twist I didn’t fully realize until I became a teacher. I am partially color blind. One day, someone handed me a test from a book — one of those “spot the bird or the numbers hidden in a tree full of leaves” exercises. I looked… and saw nothing. The numbers, the bird — they vanished into a jumble of green, brown, and other colors I couldn’t separate. Only later did I understand why blue and purple, yellow and orange, green and brown were always tricky for me.
So my artwork was… imaginative. Yet art is subjective, I suppose, and I always scored high — like everyone else in the class. Ta da.
I drew purple skies. Gave men red shoes. Painted trees that could not decide what season they were in. My cats may have been magenta — though I still have no clue what color that actually is. My world was an odd, vibrant place, and it was mine.
Maps came later — with colored pencils. Sea blue. Mountains brown. Geography survived even when art wandered. Somehow, order and imagination found a way to coexist.
Then came HB pencils. In school, they were for notes, sketches, and tests — some schoolmates were artists in miniature, shading and blending as if each page were a canvas. And of course, they came in all sorts: 1 HB, 2 HB, each with its own personality, its own purpose. In college, pencils gave way to ballpoint pens.
Pens multiplied. Blue for homework, black for tests, red for corrections — though rarely your own. Plastic ink fillers replaced the old fountain pens, but mischief remained: boys borrowing ink from one tip to another, leaky pens ruining shirts, smudged exercise notes, ruined test papers — and, of course, the occasional splash of ink across a friend’s desk or uniform. Colour became functional, efficient… and slightly chaotic.
And then there was the wedding suit. I was instructed to buy a deep blue suit. My wife wasn’t supposed to see it — it was meant to be a surprise. So there I was, shopping alone, scanning racks, and finally choosing what I thought was the perfect deep blue suit length. Before the shopkeeper cut the material, I asked him to confirm the color, pretending I knew my blues. Only then did I realize it was… purple. Deep, rich purple. I nearly surprised the entire world instead! Can you imagine me walking down the aisle in that? My wife, her family, my friends — they would have died laughing. I would never have lived it down. A lifetime of “remember the purple suit?” jokes.
Years after I had joined the workforce as a teacher, I was appointed principal. One day, a colleague asked me very seriously, “What color ink do you use?”
“Black,” I said.
He looked concerned. “But you are the principal. You should be different. You should use green.”
Green! Apparently teachers used red to correct and blue to write. Some used black and blue. But I, by virtue of my position, was expected to express individuality through green ink.
I declined. Quietly. Permanently. Leadership, I felt, should not depend on stationery.
My driving eye test was another story. Those coloured dot plates are not designed for people like me. I saw numbers that weren’t there and missed the ones that were. My overall vision is great, so it was never a problem. The examiner finally said, “As long as you can tell red from green, you’re fine.” I passed, and I still consider it a small personal victory — a reminder that rules sometimes bend for reality, and clarity often lies in what matters most.
And yet, at the heart of it all, the real question remains: what color ink do you choose to write your life with?
Black feels firm. Clear. Final.
Blue feels personal. Friendly.
Red — even when used gently — looks like trouble.
Green? I am still not sure. Individuality? Rebellion? Or just a colleague’s enthusiasm from thirty years ago?
We begin with crayons, every color at our fingertips and no instructions. We grow into pens, each color assigned a function, every choice carefully defined. We navigate the world balancing freedom with expectation, whimsy with responsibility.
Somewhere along the way, we stop colouring outside the lines.
Yet I suspect the child who mixed shades in the Camlin Camel or Luxor crayon box is still around. He appears when I sign my name, when I almost buy a purple suit, when someone suggests I should be using green ink because I am the principal.
So when someone asks, “What color ink do you use?”, remember this: it is never really about ink. Life offers countless colors, countless choices, and endless reasons to pick one over another. Some choices are ours, born from who we are; some are shaped by tradition, expectation, or the world around us. Every line we draw — every decision we make — asks the same question: whose choice is it? Ours? Or someone else’s? And the quiet courage lies in choosing the shade that feels true, even if it is unexpected, imperfect, or entirely our own.
The Bishop's School, Pune
The Bishop's School Alumni Association
ALLAHABAD CIVIL LINES NOSTALGIC MEMORIES
