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“Don’t come too close,” our normally affectionate grandmother would beseech us. (மேல படாதே, மேல படாதே was the refrain in Tamil.) Once she had showered, no one --not even a toddler-- could touch her till she had finished her morning prayers.  Unquestioningly, she followed these rules of ritual purity, which had been handed down to her as a teen bride -- till disease robbed her of memories. When Patti died, earlier this year, at the age of 96, she had been suffering from dementia for nearly a decade. A kindly South Indian grandmother, she wore a pair of asymmetrical nose rings favored by women of her generation. Forget Kanchipuram silks, she looked elegant even in her everyday white-dotted sungudi saris: a standout and a stereotypical Patti at the same time. I loved her classic paal payasam and delicious instant mango pickles. When those 2-minute noodles first appeared on the market, she said, “Maggi is just plumper semiya,” and proceeded to make a slurpy upma of it. Puzzlingly, Patti made her own “tastemaker,” a signature blend of spice powders. We claimed her unused spice sachets for use in all manner of savory dishes. With cardamom and varying combinations of saffron, nutmeg, and tricky green camphor, she conjured up a variety of sweets for our birthdays. Patti’s birthday, which fell on Children’s Day, was easy enough to remember, but we know precious little about her childhood. In 1942, when Singapore, a British bastion, fell to Japanese forces in World War II, Patti’s family in Nemmeli received visitors. It was her paternal aunt and her brood from Madras. An official order had encouraged residents of the city, who were not essential to its functioning, to leave immediately. Even the eldest of Patti’s visiting cousins, a 16-year-old, was about as non-essential as they come, and so they left for the countryside. By the time the authorities declared Madras safe again, my grandmother was married to this teenager. In the city, her cousins went back to studying. The aunt-cum-mother-in-law trained Patti in the skills needed to run a household. In independent India, the family moved up in the world. Their good-sized home earned a reputation for hospitality. House guests staying there for varying lengths of time, including young women who enrolled in colleges, could always rely on Patti for hot meals and a kind word. Patti, with her pleasant smile, served daily visitors excellent coffee. Good coffee, connoisseurs will tell you, begins with good quality milk. ‘The milkman comes with the cow at 4.30 in the morning. Someone must watch him otherwise he will add water,” says the elderly woman in R. K Narayan’s ‘The Painter of Signs.’ This aunt is now about to leave for Benares. The protagonist, the painter, realizes that if his milk and curd had been pure and creamy all along, it was thanks to the invisible labor of this elderly woman. She had stood watch beside the cow at dawn, watching the milk pail in dim light to make sure the milk remained undiluted. The jar of gingelly oil she has stocked now had to be aired once a week, and he has to ensure that insects don't get into the jar when the lid is open. And oh, there was enough stock of dried vegetables for two years; the rice in the jute bag had been picked clean of chaff and stones. “Don’t waste any of it,” she tells him before embarking on her journey. Forget all their prayers, fasting, and other rituals, a zero-waste policy seems to have been the one true religion of women of that era. Housekeeping was serious business for people like Patti. The physical and emotional labor put in by the women in charge of feeding a multi-generation family in those days boggles the mind.  And beyond the kitchen, they forged the family's future—buying gold and nurturing social networks. In a crisis, they quietly did whatever was needed to prevent the household from descending into chaos. Patti had very little leisure. In the little downtime she had, a younger Patti crocheted cute purses, drew floral-geometrical kolams or did delicate needlework. Middle-aged Patti would doze off in the middle of browsing through some Tamil weekly. Overall, she did not seem to have a lot of time and energy left for reading. After Patti had passed on, the items she had collected over a lifetime were divided among appropriate relatives. On that occasion, they handed me a thin sheaf of articles I had written for The Hindu. I burst into tears. The fact that Patti had cared to save my writing over the years was, to me, the very best keepsake. Some memories came rushing back. I recalled that Patti, the mother of six, had learned the English alphabet through a Tamil-English correspondence course. When her children left home, she wrote to them in chatty Tamil, printing just the address in English, in her neat hand. How my mother looked forward to those thin blue inland letters, crammed with news about family! At some point Patti seems to have gotten into the habit of organizing the letters she received, along with cherished photographs and newspaper clippings, into an archive of her own. A picture of my mother, her eldest, in her rented graduation robe. A full-page article about her youngest daughter’s boutique. An invite to a granddaughter’s Bharatnatyam debut. Letters from me, and my brother, as graduate students in the United States. My condolence letter when Patti’s nonagenarian mother had died in Nemmeli. (Clearly, longevity runs in the family.) And there was more. I am yet to find out what she saved of my aunt’s, a graduate of the College of Engineering, Guindy. Perhaps it will be a letter from my mother-in-law praising me when I was a new bride, the engineer jokes. Even at first glance, Patti’s curation tells a story. Women of her generation had little opportunity to study or participate in life outside their homes. So, she was delighted that her daughters were educated, and happier when the world acknowledged their work. Clearly, she saw her ten grandchildren as individuals, though she treated each of us the same. If she had a favorite, we did not know it. Patti’s best qualities – kindness and patience – we took for granted, and as for the smaller things about her, mostly, we never thought to ask. I am left with no idea of the times, the people, or the place that shaped Patti -- a first-person account of that different way of life is now lost to me. She did not seem to question ritual, husband, or hierarchy. Seismic changes in women's liberation have happened since, so there things I will never understand. How did Patti see the changing world? What was Patti’s first phone conversation? What was it like to talk to her aunt-cum-mother-in-law through this instrument? What did they chatter about? One evening, in recent years, when I held up my phone for a selfie, and asked her to smile, she responded with, “Who smiles without any reason?” I found this funny and began to laugh. The laughter must have been infectious because Patti began to smile. Soon, we were like a pair of giggly American preteens inside a photobooth at the mall. And I caught a fleeting glimpse of pre-dementia Patti.   In a Peanuts cartoon strip, the usually crabby character, Lucy, tells her class about her grandmother who used to work for the defense plant during World War II. When the men enlisted to fight, there were gaping holes in the industrial labor force, and women stepped in to fill the gap. The bandanna-clad fictitious character, Rosie the Riveter, became a powerful recruitment tool and an American cultural icon. These women recruits were expected to leave their jobs after the war ended. Those who stayed were paid less than their male peers, but men could no longer claim that women were unfit for jobs outside the home. The women had proved their worth. In the post-war era, more women entered the workforce. Rosie the Riveter, in effect, turned the tide for American women. Talk to your grandmother, ask her questions, and “you’ll find out she knows more than peanut butter cookies,” says Lucy, who had just discovered that her grandmother was a wartime riveter and the employee of a telephone company after the war. “My grandmother helped to make this country great,” she declares, and demands applause from the class. Perhaps some of our grandmothers too went to jail around the time of World War II, heeding Mahatma Gandhi’s call to women to participate in India’s freedom struggle. Managing everything at home, while the men participated in the freedom struggle was a no less valiant thing to do. We don’t know much about the personal histories of our grandmothers, and how they adapted to difficult situations. So, how best can we remember our doting grandmothers? The cartoonist Charles Schulz was reminding all of us, self-absorbed grandchildren of the world to be more curious about older women in our lives. To acknowledge their contribution. If your Patti is still around, ask her questions. You will, no doubt, be surprised and delighted by what you learn about her. Best of all, you might even catch a fleeting glimpse of your Patti as a little girl before she became what the world asked her to be. **

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You may be familiar with MS Blue, the distinctive shade of blue, named for the legendary Carnatic vocalist M.S. Subbalakshmi, but now “Mas Blue,” is all set to wow the world of art. “Mas” comes from the initials of Prof. M.A. Subramanian, the material scientist from Madras, the inventor of the vivid blue pigment known to the wider world as YInMn blue, (pronounced yin-min). “Mas,” in Spanish, means more. YInMn blue is bluer compared to any blue pigment humankind has seen before. Modern computers can display a slew of colors and creative humans have always dreamt up unique hues, but to transform any color, digital or imagined, into something real – something you can paint a wall with say – you need a pigment, and making a pigment calls for considerable ingenuity (or a very good understanding of chemistry) and, yes, some luck. Which is why the invention of the pigment YInMn blue is such a big deal.

“People have been looking for a good, durable blue pigment for a couple of centuries now,” says the academic, who earned his PhD from IIT, Madras. He recalls writing the first chapter of his doctoral thesis sitting on the grounds of Ashtalakshmi Temple in Besant Nagar, close to the institute’s campus. Nearly all his formal education was from institutions within a few mile-radius of his home in Mambalam in Chennai. Subramanian went to Texas for his postdoctoral education. After a distinguished career as a researcher for over two decades at DuPont, the American chemical giant, where he discovered several functional materials that found use mostly in electronics or energy conversion, he now teaches chemistry in Oregon State University.

In 2009, a graduate student in Subramanian’s research lab, pulverized a mixture of the oxides of yttrium, indium, and manganese, and baked the mixture, to try and create another material for use in high-tech electronics. When they opened the oven door the next day, a dazzling blue powder greeted them. His first thought Subramanian says, was an uncharitable one, “perhaps, the student has made some mistake.” But he recalled colleagues at DuPont saying that blue pigments are hard to make.

So, the researchers repeated the experiment and tested the material which turned out to be non-toxic and stable. Besides, it was resistant to heat and impervious to water, oil, and acids. Further, the material didn’t fade in sunlight, and it could block solar heat efficiently. So, it was an excellent candidate for use in outdoor paints and industrial coatings. It is going to be expensive, given the components -- Yttrium is classified a rare earth metal and is hard to find-- but the pigment holds great appeal in art because of its aesthetics.

“The reason YInMn blue is special is because, this blue is very similar to the ultramarine blue used by Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel,” says Subramanian. For the “Last Judgement” the sculptor-painter used this very bright and beautiful blue to depict the heavenly skies. During the Middle Ages, the pigment was made from lapis lazuli, literally blue rocks, from the Hindu Kush mountains. It came from beyond the sea – hence the term ultramarine. Even though ultramarine pigment was expensive – literally worth its weight in gold – Michelangelo insisted on using this pigment for the fresco on the altar wall, The Last Judgement, which was unveiled in 1541. Earlier, when Michelangelo had painted on the ceiling of Sistine Chapel, he had accepted a flat rate for labor and paint. This time he decided to bill labor and materials separately. It is human nature to insist on the best possible material, when someone else — especially in this case when someone who is opulently rich — is footing the bill and that is what the artist did. He picked the ultramarine pigment. And now  YInMn is being considered to restore the blue in the painting in Sistine Chapel.

Before he invented the blue pigment YInMn blue, Subramanian did not like to visit art museums. In fact, he says he used to grumble when he had to accompany his wife, Dr. Rajeevi Subramanian, artist and material scientist, to Louvre (France), Prada (Spain) and Guggenheim (U.S.A) to see the work of the Old Masters. Now those paintings, especially the ones that feature blue pigments, speak to him. Over the last decade, Subramanian has been an invited speaker at top art museums the world over.

Synthetic blue pigments have a rich and interesting history. The early 18^th century saw the discovery of the first modern synthetic blue pigment, Prussian Blue, also known as Berlin Blue. Under the Wave off Kanagawa, one of Hokusai’s Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji, has been an icon of Japan since the print was first struck in 1830. Its intense blue comes from Prussian Blue ink – then a foreign pigment for Japan, imported, probably via China, from Europe.

In the next century, another pigment, Cobalt Blue made its appearance on the scene. Van Gogh’s “Starry Night,” for instance, makes stunning use of Cobalt Blue. Synthetic ultramarine came soon after ,we still use a form of ultramarine to make our white clothes appear whiter , but its manufacture is not green, meaning it pollutes the environment. These pigments, which could be manufactured in bulk, were just chemicals, before the old masters painted with them.

In early 2021, YInMn Blue became widely available to artists. Any day now, someone could paint a modern masterpiece worthy of the pigment. The inventor’s wife, an art aficionado and artist to boot got first dibs on the first synthetic blue pigment to be invented in two centuries. “I believe I was the first to paint with YInMn in watercolor and acrylic,” says Dr. Rajeevi Subramanian. “When Mas first showed me the YInMn pigment I was blown away by its intensity and hue. I really wanted to paint with it.” Even a child, this color had been her favorite. “I’d paint big skies, and large ponds with blue fish, even my mountains were blue,” she says.

For color scientists, YInMn blue is a gift that keeps on giving (an Artist’s Akshayapatra, if you will.) Subramanian’s research team has used its understanding of its crystal structure and chemical makeup to try and create other safe, stable synthetic pigments of various hues. How? By modifying the ratio of existing elements in YInMn, the researchers could tweak the intensity of blue from light blue to almost black. Next, they tweaked the elements in the material. By adding copper, they got a green pigment; with the addition of iron, they got an orange pigment and so on.

 The holy grail of the pigment industry is a bright, stable red, the kind which a luxury automobile maker like Ferrari can use to paint sport cars. People in the industry say that the inventor of the Ferrari red can hope to retire early.  Despite his new fame, apart from his new-found interest in art, Prof. Subramaniam remains a man of simple tastes, who loves curiosity-driven research, and his nightly meal of curd rice and pickle. Money is not a motivator for Mas. The researcher, who earned his PhD in 1982, still enjoys spending most of his time in the lab. “People say you don’t have a life if you do this, but it’s not true. It’s just that you enjoy what you do,” says the man whose name is now part of pigment lore.

A BlueTiful Story -- Hear the man speak of his invention.  

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