Woman credits India's vibrant colours for rekindling joy after four years in Canada

Mohini Mohandas stepped off a plane in India after four years in Canada and noticed something she hadn't expected to miss: colour. Not the food, not the festivals, not even the weather. It was the simple, everyday presence of visual brightness—in the clothes people wore, in the nail polish on their hands, in the sheer chromatic abundance of a crowded street or a shop window. She posted a video about it on Instagram, and something in that observation struck a chord.

In the clip, Mohandas describes the shift with the clarity of someone who has just named something she couldn't quite articulate before. For four years in Canada, she had worn beige, grey, white, and greige to work. Day after day, the same muted palette. It was not a rule written down anywhere. It was simply what the workplace seemed to expect, what blended in, what was safe. Then she came home to India and wore a red dress and blue nail polish. She went to an exhibition and saw clothes in every conceivable shade of green, blue, pink, and purple—all of them bright, all of them unapologetic. There was sequin work, shiny details, visual abundance everywhere. "I did not realise how much life that would bring back into me," she said, "and how it would reignite my soul until I moved back."

The video's caption carried a wry edge: "Colour is apparently restricted to Hollywood." It was a joke, but it was also a statement about something real—the way certain geographies seem to permit visual expression while others discourage it, or at least make it feel risky. The comments section filled quickly with people recognizing themselves in her words. "Welcome back to maximalism and yellow sunlight," one person wrote. Another: "I miss the colours in India so much. I have lived in the US and Japan, and there is so little colour here." Someone else called it an underrated topic. "Colour brings so much life and positive energy," they said.

But not everyone saw it that way. One commenter pushed back gently, noting that colour deprivation was not inevitable—it was a choice. "I make sure to keep colour in my life wherever I am," they wrote. "I always wear the brightest colours and the blingiest outfits because I choose to be authentically myself, whether I am in Canada or India." It was a fair point, and it opened up a more complicated question: Is the absence of colour something imposed by geography and workplace culture, or something we accept because we have internalized the expectation? Probably both.

The thread revealed a pattern among people who had lived abroad. One person had spent ten years in Canada and thought about India's festivals and colours every single day. Another had lived in the US and Japan and felt the same deprivation. Someone else joked that they had switched their Instagram profile to black and white after moving to Canada—a small, darkly funny surrender to the aesthetic of their new home. What emerged was not a simple story of one woman missing colour, but a broader recognition among expatriates that the visual environment shapes how you feel, how you present yourself, and perhaps even who you become. Mohandas had named something that others had felt but not quite articulated: that colour is not frivolous, that it is not merely decorative, that it is bound up with joy and self-expression and the permission to take up space. And for her, moving back to India meant reclaiming that permission.