hair's colour in Sanskrit

[Vidyasankar Sundaresan]

> >eyes and hair - in Bombay, it is standard procedure to tease one's
> >konkaNastha brAhmaNa classmates with an allegation of some unknown
> >European (particularly Portuguese) ancestry.
> 
> Really - i hav never come across that one - and I should know. i am from
> Bambay, and a konkaNastha brAhmaNa too !!!!

This might be a recent development, but at a place like the IIT Bombay
campus, such teasing normally targeted those konkaNasthas who sincerely
believed in their superior Aryan descent, or towards those who regretted
that they did not have the distinctive gAre DoLe - gore pAn 
characteristics. The south Indians often resorted to this, as an answer to
a remark about their darker skin color. One standard retort: "At least,
I'm a pure Dravidian, the only Aryan in you is of European descent". If
you were a south Indian brahmin yourself, you just hoped that the Marathi
guy did not know enough of southern politics to catch you on that one!
Thankfully, to my knowledge, such joking remained good-natured. 

Vidyasankar