Light and Culture

Culture shock usually manifests in stages and as an aggregated effect of several isolated events over a period of time.  Just as thermal shock is caused by starkly contrasting temperatures, events that contribute to culture shock are ones that lay bare contrasting circumstances pertaining to economic, intellectual, or social disparities.  Interestingly, the contrast in such circumstances need not be particularly stark to create an impact.  Take my case, for instance.  Despite having grown up in a major city in India and having enjoyed a fairly privileged first 22 years of my life, replete with a good deal of what one might call 'western' affectations, there come to mind numerous such events that have revealed many a contrasting 'where it's at' in the course of my NE Ohioan inhabitancy, starting with the day I landed on US soil and hitched a ride with a PhD student in his automatic transmission car (never had I seen a gear stick that moved in a single line) and rode the great American interstate highways (never had I seen a freeway with so many ramps and exits, or experienced such a smooth ride at 70 mph).

It is necessary to note that not every contrasting circumstance is indicative of the superiority or inferiority of any one of the two lifestyles in question.  Besides, superiority is subjective and is only a matter of perception.  A great example that illustrates this is the subject of home lighting.  My upbringing in urban India of the 80s/90s effectively conditioned my mind to postulate that the then ubiquitous fluorescent tubelight, the domestic lighting de choix of the average urban Indian household, was the superiormost home lighting choice, and that lamps that shone shades any yellower than the regal white tubelight belonged to a lower birth in the lamp hierarchy and were better suited for jobs more menial like illuminating the streets or something.  Imagine the culture shock when I saw the supposedly forward thinking Americans give the cool shoulder to the cool tubelight in favor of the warmer and more primitive alternative - the incandescent bulb.  It had to do, they said, with the welcoming warm glow of the 2700K soft white incandescent bulb as opposed to the 4000K bright white fluorescent lights that reminded them of a hospital or an industrial setting.

Here's why I think India got used to white lighting while the US stayed illuminated in yellow incandescence.  Without getting into the details of why India got ahead of the US in the race to phasing out incandescent light bulbs in favor of more efficient lighting alternatives, or delving into a discussion about the absurdity of deregulation of domestic energy policies, let me just say India had started adopting energy efficient lighting alternatives even before I was born, and at the time, the only fluorescent lighting available was the obnoxiously white kind my generation grew up with.  By the time the US was ready to upgrade it’s lighting to CFLs, technology had advanced enough to provide to the masses the option of a 2700K warm white CFL to warm their hearts just like the incandescent bulb.

You might be wondering why I am blubbering wildly on this subject.  This thought tsunami started with a simple sequence of events earlier this week.  It was 7pm one evening when Pavana asked me to turn on our living room lights, a modest arrangement of three 2700K 60W equivalent LED bulbs, which I proceeded to turn on one by one.  After the third bulb was turned on, Pavana remarked, “Why is it still so dull?”

“May be because it’s too yellow?  Should we try white LEDs?”, I replied.

“No.  Whites look weird.  Not welcoming.”

“Then should we put brighter bulbs?”

“That would be too yellow then.”

“Okay, then we should change them to white, right?”

“No.  Whites aren't welcoming.”

“Then let's try putting brighter bulbs.”

“No.  That would be too yellow.”

A slight throbbing developed in the back of my head.  I aborted the futile talk and turned to the Amazon app on my phone.  A cursory search drew a dizzying volume of search results.  I then aborted the search as well.

Over the next couple days though, I did some reading.  I discovered that the Correlated Color Temperature (CCT), i.e. the measure of the warmth using 2700K, 4000K, 5000K etc., is far from being the be-all and end-all for measuring this.  Lighting pundits have apparently been using something called the general Color Rendering Index (CRI), a utility of the Commission internationale de l'éclairage (CIE), for over 50 years.  This CRI is something I have routinely seen printed on the packaging for lights, but always selectively ignored.  In simple terms, a light source's CRI indicates how closely it can render colors like the sun on a scale of 0-100.  The humble incandescent bulb clocks at the most ideal CRI of 100, which explains why it remains the most preferred choice of indoor illumination, while the traditional white tubelight clocks at a CRI of 85-89, which is what folks like me from India are conditioned to.  It is hard to draw a correlation between CCT and CRI, and it becomes a function of the wavelength, because while the low CCT incandescent bulb renders all colors equally well, higher CCT fluorescents render some colors better than others.  With the advent of solid-state lighting (LEDs) however, researchers have found deficiencies with CRI measurement.  The  Illuminating Engineering Society (IES) came up with an alternative to CRI via the technical memorandum IES TM-30-15, which introduces three metrics, namely the Fidelity Index that is similar to the CRI, the Gamut Index that indicates how intense the colors are (saturation level), and the Color vector Graphic that indicates which colors are saturated or desaturated.  Another alternate metric called the Color Quality Scale (CQS) was developed by NIST.  CQS is like a CRI-plus that considers parameters like chromatic discrimination and human preference in addition to color rendering.

To cut a long story short, I brought to bear all of this new found wisdom and ended up purchasing a set of soft white 3000K 65W equivalent LED recessed flood bulbs for our kitchen.  These bulbs have a humble CRI of 90, but our tubelight-conditioned brains think this is ideal.  We love that it sort of looks yellow but yet yields light almost as white as the tubelight.  All of a sudden now, our kitchen looks cheerful.  The counters look bright.  We don't cut our fingers anymore while chopping fruits.  However, note that we changed only our kitchen lights.  The living room lights alluded to above are still yellow and melancholy.  This lighting disparity unfortunately results in an unanticipated emotional gradient when one walks from the kitchen into the living area.