My discussion with Punya about Grover’s All India Rank compelled me to revisit one of my favorite films of this century – Masaan. It’s almost like our discussion on becoming and Euler brought a newfound appreciation for the film’s continuity. In Masaan, Grover situates one story of an engineer against the eternal flow of the Ganges, a river that has long symbolized the cycle of birth, death, and renewal. The film makes visible the paradox of becoming: while life unfolds amidst the everyday demands of family, societal discrimination, and relationships, it does so on the banks of a river that constantly reminds its inhabitants of impermanence. One of the two main characters belongs to a family whose caste has been designated as those who cremate the bodies – in this exercise, one gruesome night, he finds the body of the young lady he was dating. Even in this film, Grover integrates the idea of becoming! Both stories intersect at the end: when the characters meet seemingly serendipitously, it is their pain, loss, and journey that provides new insight on their previous condition. They board a boat in the same Ganges that was the scenery of their suffering – but it provides a newfound clarity. Sitting once more at the banks of the Ganges, the characters encounter the same river but with transformed perception—its flowing waters now a mirror of their own impermanence. What was once ordinary becomes a site of new clarity, where the experience of loss and change allows them to see continuity and possibility with fresh understanding.

Perhaps the Ganges is Euler’s equation, as evoked in All India Rank—a symbol of both inevitability and beauty, a pattern flowing endlessly through time. Just as Euler’s identity astonishes mathematicians with its perfect union of constants, the Ganges gathers within itself the paradoxes of life and death, permanence and impermanence. Returning to its banks after loss, the characters in Masaan encounter the same river, but see it differently. What once appeared as the backdrop to ordinary life now becomes an equation of existence itself—fluid and inexhaustible. 

Interestingly enough, this motif emphasizes insignificance. Above all, as a STEM education professor, what moved me the most was Grover’s recent interview with the Homi Bhabha Center for Science Education. In this talk, he described not only the scene discussed above (e.g. Sarika describing her dream of seeing connections between physics and lived experience), but highlights a recurring theme – the insignificance of human existence. In terms of the vastness and span of the universe, he points out Sagan’s observation, “We are only a blue pale dot” – he, in fact, concludes with the imperative that we have to take our insignificance seriously. I often reflect upon this as an educator: the challenge lies in developing an awe and adulation for the universe at the same time as actualizing this insignificance. What a beautiful dichotomy!

Reflecting upon this discussion, I recalled my recent visit to a museum. Walking through the space section of the Denver Museum of Science, I was struck by a sudden smallness. The vastness of the physical universe—the unthinkable expanse of galaxies, the billions of years charted on glowing timelines—makes the self feel almost irrelevant. Yet this feeling of insignificance is not confined to the cosmos alone. Even if one narrows focus to our own planet, the journey from early Earth to the amoeba, to the reign of dinosaurs, and finally to the emergence of mammals overwhelms its scope. Traversing this history is daunting because it collapses the personal into the geological. The sensation mirrors Carl Sagan’s meditation on the “pale blue dot”: that despite our dramas, triumphs, and failures, we are but a speck suspended in an immeasurable continuum. And yet, in that humbling recognition lies a clarity—the same clarity evoked on the banks of the Ganges or in the elegance of an equation—that the beauty of existence is inseparable from its impermanence.

When we teach the “nature of science” or the scientific method, we often emphasize it as a linear and mechanistic sequence—observe, hypothesize, test, conclude. Yet science in practice rarely follows such neat steps. The same equation, observation, or phenomenon, when seen in another light, can suddenly yield profound new insight. Knowledge, then, is not a fixed object outside the observer, but emerges through perspective, timing, and becoming. Einstein’s “most beautiful thought” did not arrive the first time he stared at the clock tower from his clerk office window, but only after lingering with the same scene, refracted through further contemplations and lived experience. In this sense, science is not only cumulative but transformative: the same reality seen anew can change everything. And this insight carries us back to the humbling vastness of science itself. To look upward into the cosmos or inward into Earth’s long history is to feel small, but not diminished. It is to recognize our insignificance as empowering—an invitation to see, to imagine, and to participate in the unfolding of knowledge as becoming.