A physicist on a steamship in 1921 got fed up with the textbook answer for why the ocean is blue. So he reached into his coat pocket, pulled out a small prism, held it up to the water, and proved the textbook wrong. The work that grew out of it won him a Nobel Prize.
His name was C.V. Raman. The textbook line, from a famous scientist named Lord Rayleigh, was that the sea looks blue for one boring reason: it's just a mirror reflecting the blue sky. Raman used his prism to strip the sky's reflection off the surface. If the textbook were right, the blue should have gone faint. It got deeper. The color belonged to the water itself.
Sunlight is a mix of every color, and water eats the warm ones first. Red is gone in the first few meters. Orange and yellow fade a little deeper. Blue is the only color that keeps going, all the way down to around 200 meters, about the length of two football fields laid end to end. So at noon, when the sun is high and beats straight down, its light dives deep into the water. The warm colors get swallowed, and the blue that survives bounces back up to your eye. Near the surface, tiny floating plants carry the same green coloring you find in grass, and in shallow water they turn that blue toward the bright turquoise in the 12:00 clip.
The morning and evening colors work differently, and it comes down to one thing: where the sun is sitting. When the sun is straight overhead, the sea acts like clear glass. It bounces back only about 2 of every 100 rays that hit it, so you look right through to the real color below. When the sun drops low, near sunrise or sunset, the surface flips and acts like a mirror, throwing back almost everything. At 6:00 it shows you the pale gray of the morning sky. At 20:00 it shows you the warm copper of the sunset. Light coming in at that low angle has to fight through so much extra air that the blue gets scattered away, and only the warm colors are left to bounce off the water.
Those sparkles in the 16:00 clip even have a name: sun glint. Every little ripple is tilted at its own angle, so each one works like a tiny mirror, and thousands of them flash back at you at once.
Nothing in the water changed between morning and night. The salt, the plants, the depth all stayed put. The only things moving were the sun and the sky it lit up, and the sea just handed you back whatever was hanging above it.
Indeed! To conflate a Rasgulla with an Idli is not just a culinary error; it is a profound cosmological misunderstanding.
To begin with, the comparison is practically a biological impossibility. She is comparing chhena (the delicate, squeaky, pristine curd of milk) with a meticulously fermented batter of parboiled rice and black gram (urad dal). Their compositions are from entirely different kingdoms. One is an airy, spongy lattice designed to trap light sugar syrup; the other is a dense, wholesome, steamed matrix of complex carbohydrates and proteins. Their taste, consistency, structural integrity, and existential purpose share absolutely nothing in common.
But more important, her attempt to dismiss the Idli as merely a blank canvas for sugar syrup does a grave disservice to what is arguably one of the greatest engineering marvels of the culinary world.
The Idli is not a mere "bland cake." It is a masterclass in biotechnology. To achieve the perfect Idli is to balance the delicate microflora of wild fermentation over a cold night, resulting in a steamed cloud that is a triumph of gut health, lightness, and nutritional balance. It is a savoury monolith of South Indian culinary genius, perfectly engineered to absorb the sharp tang of a well-spiced sambar or the fiery depth of a molaga-podi (gunpowder) paste infused with cold-pressed sesame oil or nutritious melted ghee.
To suggest an Idli would even consent to being drowned in sugar syrup is to fundamentally misunderstand its dignity.
If this lady finds Rasgullas overrated, argue that on the merits of their sponginess or sweetness. But please, leave the noble, perfectly fermented, steamed majesty of the Idli out of your dessert-table polemics, ma'am!
Btw in your 20’s and 30’s you’ll start rediscovering the niche interests and hobbies you had as a kid. It’s very important you revisit them. Your younger self was actually on to something
When I say I miss MS Dhoni, this is exactly what I mean.
I firmly believe that players were given a separate session to make them understand his gestures before getting inducted in the team.
This paragraph by Richard Feynman hits so hard:
“Fall in love with some activity, and do it! Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn’t matter. Explore the world. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough. Work as hard and as much as you want to on the things you like to do the best. Don’t think about what you want to be, but what you want to do. Keep up some kind of a minimum with other things so that society doesn’t stop you from doing anything at all.”
Cool things at IISc today. Openday can’t be the day to show advanced research tbh or judge the insti, since the people have to cater to school kids and non technical audience alike, and thus quite some cutting edge research has to be dumbed down/not shown.