Ram Setu - Decoded

I sometimes just love how wild my train of thought runs. This morning I was listening to the song Dhan Te Nan from the movie "Kaminey". One of the lines in it says "Koi chaal aisi chalo yaar abke samandar bhi pul pe chale, phir tu chale uspe ya mein chalun shehar ho apne pairon tale" listening to it I imagined the sea water flooding over the bridge and two people walking over the water. :P

Anyways from there my mind wandered off to the concept of water-walking and the first instance of people doing that - "The Ram Setu"

And I thought how can people be so naive as to believe that it was a miracle. But then stones floating in water can do that to people. However u also need to keep in mind that Nal and Neel were engineers and engineers do a lot of cool stuff!! :P

Nyways now as they were engineers they are bound to have a good knowledge of physics. And hence would know that if air is trapped within a shell of silica it would look like a stone but would actually be very light and would thus float.

Pumice is one such stone that floats on water. Infact as a recent example, after the explosion of Krakatoa near Indonesia Pumice rafts were seen floating for over upto 20 years. So that resolves the mystery of floating stones. But from where did so much Pumice come? Not sure how many of u know this but the Andaman & Nicobar Islands contain three big ancient volcanoes. One of which is Active even today. And the prime source of pumice is... Yup u guessed it right.. Volcanoes. So during the volcanic eruptions from those volcanoes pumice must've formed and floated to the coast of TN. Lucky for our heroes rt.

Half the mystery is solved. But then there's another rumour that it was the name of Ram that made the stone float. From a layman's perspective if I would've seen that I would go and tell : "They wrote something on the stone and the stone floated!!!" But here's a perfectly reasonable explanation. There were just two engineers who knew the difference between what'll float and what'll not. So how do they make the labourers know which stone to use and which not to use? Simple.. write something on it to differentiate.

And rest as they say was a miracle so big that people today are ready to cut each other's throats for it.

Note: This also explains why the Ram Setu is under water today. Pumice doesn't float forever. :)