A midsummer delight's dream

Hindustan Times

01-06-2025

It's the month when even the Sun blushes green with envy.
It's the season of Cannes, cricket and canary chandeliers.
Come June, and it lights up our lives with golden 'chandeliers'.
Chandeliers that screen us from the fierce June sun. Chandeliers that almost outshine the dazzle of the ripe summer sun.
Amaltas, ahoy!
What the golden Daffodils are to William Wordsworth, the Amaltas is perhaps to the desi poetic pen.
Childhood meant growing up with different sort of sun screens in summer. Sun screens that had nothing to do with chemicals and commercials. Summers that had nothing to do with stocks and stocks of sun screens.
Rather, summers that had everything to do with stalks and stalks of sun screens. Sun screens that had everything to do with Mother Nature's caps that were a canary yellow.
Caps that boasted fashionable fascinators. Wispy, whispering fascinators of a pale leafy green or bough brownness.
Fascinators that sometimes stuck their neck out like a dowager Duchess dripping diamonds. Fascinators that sometimes turned up their noses over the canary-coloured cap like a snooty senorita serenading the Cannes carpet.
Childhood meant levitating on lean Lunas or puffing 'n' pedalling on Atlas cycles to convent campuses with Mother Nature's sun screens shading us along avenues of abundance in our 'City Beautiful'.
Adulthood, alas, spelt a goodbye to Atlas cycles and much else, ushering in instead another sight on those avenues to compare with that canvas of canary.
The canary canopies over the roads rivalled later by a different splash of yellow on the roads.
The new-age Nano, driving in dressed in hell of a yellow.
The nouveau Nano came nearest to resonating and strutting that signature goldenness of the Amaltas on the streets.
Ah, not to forget the iconic 'peeli' Ambassadors, majestic predecessors to the humble Nano. The loud yellow Amby, a pop culture emblem, a sight so synonymous with the streets of Kolkata. The ample 'Ambys' indeed quite mirrored and matched the riot of yellow unfurled on the streets by summer's showstopper Amaltas.
Childhood was made up of this jugalbandi of 'pop' palettes of parrot yellowness.
Adulthood, alas, saw a passing into the attics of archival memory of the peeli Amby, as also the short-lived Nano. What endures on summer's canvas of canary is that canopied czar. Abiding, alluring Amaltas.
Colours of Cannes
Those street palettes now find a resonance more in IPL stadia. In the canary coloured jerseys of the Chennai Super Kings (CSK). It's another story that the CSK fortunes resemble more those of Trump's torpedoed tariffs.
Summer spells much colour for cinephiles, too. Literally and figuratively.
It was a moment as golden as a summer sun dabbed with glitter blusher when Satyajit Ray's iconic film 'Aranyer Din Ratri', in its restored avatar, received a standing ovation at Cannes.
Nothing could be more symbolic of summer's return to colour than this milestone moment.
After the bloody palettes of early May, that resonated more the raging red of the Gulmohar, riding Operation Sindoor, midsummer has seen a 4K restoration of Ray's 1970 classic, an initiative led by Wes Anderson.
Midsummer thus spells a return to all that is golden.
Cinema. Canopies. Childhood memories.
The curious case of 'All That Glitters Is (B)old Gold'.
June heralds its own riot of colours that rule the streets to stadia
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