“The sky so vast feels like it has no end!
It curves at some places and then has a bend!
The ocean also tries to catch now thats sweet!
But everyone knows that they can never meet!”
This is the most common colour in the world but still is the rarest!
It also means that you are sad!
There is also a instrument to measure it! Not the same thing though!
Confusingly intrigued!?
read on!
Now do not worry; I will not keep you in suspense! The colour which is so common is BLUE!
The sky is blue and so is the ocean! So vast and so blue! You can feel that it has no beginning or the end!
This is also the reason why many times in the Hindu Puranas; the God is painted in Blue! It represents the infinite!
But if you actually see any natural species being truly blue; you will be shocked that there are very few naturally blue species in the world! Which again shows how blue is special!
Then again, blue is also associated with depression or sadness!
The term ‘Blues’ may have originated from “blue devils”, meaning melancholy and sadness! An early use of the term in this sense is in George Colman’s one-act farce Blue Devils! The phrase ‘blue devils’ may also have been derived from a British usage of the 1600s referring to the “intense visual hallucinations that can accompany severe alcohol withdrawal” which may be why in the 1800s in the United States, the term “blues” was associated with drinking alcohol! An association is the meaning which survives in the phrase ‘blue law’, which prohibits the sale of alcohol on Sunday!
The actual phrase “the blues” was written by Charlotte Forten, then aged 25, in her diary on December 14, 1862. She was a free-born black woman from Pennsylvania who was working as a schoolteacher in South Carolina, instructing both slaves and freedmen, and wrote that she “came home with the blues” because she felt lonesome and pitied herself.
Even now the songs which resonate these emotions are called the blues!
Then again the sky is blue is just a fact!
The blue of the sky was actually so impressive that there was an inventor who invented a device to measure the blue of the sky!
Swiss physicist Horace Bénédict de Saussure’s 1789 invented the Cyanometer which was a circle of paper swatches dyed in increasingly deep blues, shading from white to black!
Its most advanced iteration was intended to show how the color of the sky changed with elevation!
Saussure’s fascination with the blueness of the sky began when he was a young student and traveled to the base of Mont Blanc. Overawed by the summit, he dreamt of climbing it, but instead used his family’s wealth to offer a reward to the first person who could!
When no one took up the offer or did not care enough; Twenty-seven years later, Saussure himself would ascend to the top, in 1786, carrying with him “pieces of paper colored different shades of blue, to hold up against the sky and match its color!
Local legend had it that if one climbed high enough it turned black and one would see, or even fall into, the void — such terrors kept ordinary men away from the peaks. But to Saussure, the blue colour was an optical effect. And because on some days the blue of the sky faded imperceptibly into the white of the clouds, Saussure concluded that the colour must indicate its moisture content!
At the top of Mont Blanc, the physicist measured what he deemed “a blue of the 39th degree.”!
The tool did, however, accompany the famed geographer Alexander von Humboldt across the Atlantic to the Caribbean, the Canary Islands, and South America, to set a new record, at the 46th degree of blue, for the darkest sky ever measured!
There is of course no scientific use of that invention which may be why he got the Blues when it simply went into obscurity! Maybe one day you may need a Cyanometer and it may drive away your blues! One can only hope for the best! One of the best of course was Rajendra Prasad ji who was the only president to serve two full terms of 12 years and set guidelines for the behaviour of Parliamentarians which is still followed now!
Hope that is some less blue!
A sketch and blog after a very busy day of super fun and games!
This is as much tired you can be that you just close your eyes and sleep!
Shubh Ratri!
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