It has been an arid few months in Kota Bharu and El Nino hasn’t even arrived!
Yet for the past two days, the sky darkened with the promise of rain, delivering much-needed water together with gale-force winds that blew roofs off, uprooted trees and caused electrical failures around town.
From contending with “Air Kelate” that rivalled Starbucks’ Caramel Latte, we now had fresh water with unexpectedly strong winds.
Not exactly what we, in Kelantan, prayed en masse for, but then as Paulo Coelho pointed out “People are never satisfied. If they have a little, they want more… Once they have more, they wish they could be happy with little…”
Be that as it may, as the winds and the rain receded, from my home, on the river, I saw a double rainbow in all its glory.
It had a high arc of seven colours and from my vantage point, appeared to occupy the entire sky.
Don’t you just love looking at rainbows? There’s something inspiring about them. I recall teaching my children the mnemonic that would allow them to remember the colours of the rainbow.
My grandchildren learned about colours from a rainbow-coloured toy called “My Little Pony”. Harmless behaviours inspired by the ephemeral rainbow.
The rainbow in history
Aristotle was the first to fully include rainbows among the phenomena studied by physicists while Abu Hasan Muhammad ibn Hasan, a mathematician born in Tabriz, Iran, gave important contributions to number theory and to the mathematical theory of light, with interesting insights about colours and rainbows.
Indeed, the rainbow has always been seen in terms of a mixture of science and alchemy, sense and sensibility. Rainbows have a rich and long history dating back in time to Noah's Ark.
Some cultures view rainbows as omens and others see them as lucky. According to the Bible, rainbows are a promise from God to never flood the earth again.
In the Quran, surah 35:27 says: “Do you not see that Allah sends down rain from the sky, and We produce fruits of varying colours? And in the mountains are tracts, white and red of varying shades, and some intensely black.
In a hadith, Ibn 'Abbas said: "The rainbow is security for the people of the earth that they will not be drowned. The Milky Way is the door of the heavens and forms a furrow through it."
Rainbows in a modern context
As history shows, the rainbow colours have been used to symbolise many things.
The original gay pride flag in 1978 had eight colours.
A year later, its pink and turquoise stripes were dropped. A decade after that, black was added to represent the AIDS crisis.
Currently, the pride flag has six colours unlike the seven of the rainbow and this is at the root of a recent issue in Malaysia.
Our home minister has clarified that although Malaysia does not recognise the LGBT movement, the government does not discriminate against members of the community.
Neither should we discriminate against the rainbow.
In 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic arrived, children started drawing rainbows and taping them on windows as a symbol of hope. The child-generated rainbows varied, but they were all symbols of optimism, that there was light at the end of the tunnel.
The late South African president Nelson Mandela famously said: "Each of us is intimately attached to the soil of this beautiful country… – a rainbow nation at peace with itself and the world."
The term “Rainbow Nation” was intended to encapsulate the unity of multi-culturalism and the coming-together of people of many different nations, in a country once identified with the strict division of white and black under the Apartheid regime.
An apt symbol indeed.
The rainbow is a symbol that extends across the spectrum. Whatever, it stands for, I certainly should not have to think twice before posting a picture of my double rainbow on social media.
Colours of diversity
Malaysia is a religiously and ideologically plural society that is subjected to numerous influences.
In this context, when the rainbow takes up a new symbolic role, it can be fraught with tensions.
There will be conflicting and competing opinions, there will be strong words about the much-maligned rainbow whose beauty is ephemeral until the next time when the observer is caught between raindrops and the light.
Like my children and grandchildren, we need to learn from the rainbow about refraction and internal reflection, two things which a rainbow does best.
From ancient Greeks to modern scientists, the rainbow’s colours belong to the world of physics but also, as Thomas Young wrote in 1803, to the world of speculation and imagination and now to politics.
Sunlight reflected in the clouds, the incidence of light rays, and the reason for the rainbow’s shape, are aspects that have for centuries intrigued scholars and continue to intrigue us even today, albeit in an entirely different context altogether.
In the colours of the rainbow I see diversity, differences and immense possibilities. Please let me have my rainbow.
Whatever you are, whoever you may be, you need to find your own rainbow and be happy with it. - Mkini
DR ZALINA ISMAIL is former professor in Neurophysiology at the School of Health Sciences, Universiti Sains Malaysia and Fellow of the Foundation for Advancement of International Medical Education and Research.
The views expressed here are those of the author/contributor and do not necessarily represent the views of MMKtT.
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