He was told he couldn't even jump over a garden chair.

And in the beginning, he couldn't.

But at the Olympics in Mexico in 1968, Dick Fosbury would invent a high jump technique people laughed at. It looked far from graceful. 

As he approached the bar, he turned his back on it and when airborne, flopped his body across in an arc with millimeters to spare.

That was also the year the landing pad was replaced with rubber foam. Without the foam, there was no way to use the technique.

Even today, that jump looks wrong - like sailing over a wall backwards. You'll never attempt it instinctively.

Yet, this civil engineering student at 21 made the connection between a low center of gravity and arching his back to clear a 2.24 metres high bar without toppling it. Setting a new record and winning the gold.

Disruptors aren't welcome. And Fosbury never competed again.

He was no role model. A loner, with mismatched shoes, he would have been a nightmare as a potential brand ambassador. 

And yet, he changed the way every high jump athlete is trained today. The scissor technique is buried.

The Fosbury flop endures, over 50 years later.

Holi-ness!

It's all about colours.

Multi-hued faces and buckets of water poured on people caught up in the spirit of the moment

And the songs that reverberate in the movies.

Soaking heroines in rain and bursts of psychedelic colour has been a common ploy to escape the censor's vigilant scissors.

And so have energetic dances that capture the vibrance of Holi.

But the colours had begun to bleed a bit - the chemicals were irritating to the eyes and causing health issues.

That's when a small village in Jharkhand, Chonga,  discovered an opportunity that would catapult them into the centre of the 'organic' color business of Holi.

Through extensive manual labour, the villagers of Chonga extract a bright yellow from the Palash flowers. They are plucked and sun dried for a whole year.

The dry flowers are cooked in boiling water and the colour from the petals seeps  into the water. 

This base is used to create several other colours of the spectrum - and there's huge demand for the product, both within and outside the country.

The Hindi movie industry is a fan.

And probably the best off-season customer.

Nothing like Holi-ness to create an atmosphere that resonates with audiences worldwide.

Rail is the new Silk Road

It normally pops up in history text books.

But a new one is forming, working its way around all the geopolitical tension and undercurrents.

Container traffic already moves on railway lines covering distances of over 1000 kms a day - connecting Europe to China via Mongolia, since 2017

For centuries, ships were the dominant way to manage trade between continents

But there is significant progress being made in unifying railway line widths and connections right across Europe, Russia and China.

It's the same problem as electric plugs in one country not being compatible in another but at a different scale. The gauges in one country are not compatible with the neighboring ones.

As long as trains only moved within a country, it didn't matter. But if it loses out on trade simply because rail lines are narrow, change begins because every country wants a share.

It will take a few decades. Agreements that have to be worked out between nations as goods transit multiple countries on journeys.

New destinations will spring into prominence on land as they become transit hubs and reroute goods from rail to road and the seas.

These days, silk may only be flying Club Class

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