how water travels in air !!! ~ Uriyadi !

Uriyadi  is not simply a water sport – it is divine for the cowherds & devotees – those of us who have seen will understand the religious fervour – this is more on how Water travels when thrown with a conical object  – projectile - momentum → liquid sheet → fragmentation → droplets → projectile motion. Do you see a peacock in the water ??

Some Science behind the water thrown with force from a Conical object.  The water probably travels several metres per second. With a sufficiently fast shutter, individual sheets, strands and droplets become visible. With a slow shutter, the same scene would instead appear as broad white streaks.  In this picture taken at Uriyadi thiruvizha at Thiruvallikkeni before Sri Parthasarathi Perumal, you can see  the water travelling from the right side toward the centre-left. It does not behave as one solid body of water. You can see several stages almost simultaneously:

1.    Immediately after being thrown, the water has considerable forward velocity and initially travels as a comparatively dense sheet or mass. The individual water molecules remain together because of cohesion and surface tension.

2.    The sheet stretches and becomes thinner. Different portions of the water have slightly different velocities and directions. Air resistance acts strongly on the broad, thin sheet, so it becomes unstable.

3.    The sheet tears into streams and droplets. This is what makes the photograph so interesting. Across the right half you can actually see numerous fine, almost parallel streaks. Those are droplets moving rapidly during the camera exposure.

4.    Gravity simultaneously pulls everything downward. So each individual droplet follows approximately a projectile trajectory — forward motion combined with downward acceleration. With sufficient distance, the overall path would become a parabola, although air drag makes it somewhat different from the ideal mathematical parabola.

Believe it is striking as a whip and will be pretty painful ! .. .. and it is divine !!

Interesting !

Regards – S Sampathkumar
6^th Sept 2026