The Joy of watching a flow

Back in 2006, I was roaming around in North Kerala and was exploring a not much known Chandragiri fort (Kasargod District). The fort is peculiarly in the middle of a rural hamlet camouflaged by the farms around, but at an elevation. The fort had almost nothing on its top (as expected), but the view from the top was wonderful, especially, the serenely flowing Chandragiri river joining the Arabian Sea. While the Konkan dwellers may think it as nothing special, that was the first time I was seeing a river joining the sea. It was the end of a journey by disappearing in the endless sea. And very similar to the end of a human being who will be lost forever in the organic cycle that Nature has set in place on Earth.

During my years of roaming, the one thing that never tired me is the joy of watching the river flow. Whether it is the trickles from the rocks or the hum of the stream; whether it is the noise of a waterfall or the calmness in the valleys, the river shows inimitable characteristics. In the popular film song "Nadhiye! Nadhiye!" in the movie Rhythm, Vairamuthu poetically captures the similarities between a river and a female.

Poetically or not, the abstract way of looking at life of a man seems to be no different from that of a river. In the early days, man hardly gets to move around, just like the river barely manages to flow at its mouth. It is really funny that we can essentially divert the entire flow of the mighty river (say Cauvery) into a waterbottle, (that is, in Talacauvery), which by the time it reaches the sea is thousands of feet wide.

Not just the birth and death, but a river's flow can be analogically looked even further with that of humans. The brash youth of humans in their teenage is captured as the wild nature of streams wading through the rocky surfaces. It is also when the river takes giant leaps in the form of waterfall, and the time when man starts making big strides in life. During his/her youth humans go through myriad of mood swings aptly captured by that of rivers too.

Cauvery joins its tributary Aarkavaty in Sangama in Karnataka, both running wild. Just a couple of kilometers further, this new couple gets squeezed by the rocks around through a narrow patch of just a few feet, in a place named Mekedatu. The force of water here is just unimaginable: a wild river, which was a few hundred feet wide, gets squeezed to a couple of feet. No doubt this is a popular picnic spot. However, during a visit there, me and my friends went further into the woods beyond Mekedatu to find an extremely different mood of Cauvery, where it had widened so much that the flow was almost noiseless. The case is no different for most rivers, for instance, the Niagara. After the river falls beautifully and noisily posing for thousands of cameras, it calms down within a few hundred feet in stark contrast to the commotion sometime back with hardly anyone taking notice.

A calm Niagara

While early life is time for opportunities, there are times when a decision early in life may well determine the eventual destiny of one's life, landing you virtually on the opposite side of the world. Deep into the Bridger-Teton National forest in Wyoming, USA, an apparently innocuous stream forks into two. The baffling thing about this fork in North Two Ocean Creek is that, one of them goes east to meet the Atlantic ocean and the other to the Pacific thousands of miles apart.

A small slip and you will be thousands of miles apart. Source: Internet

When two individuals decide to spend their rest of life together, especially when they don't know much about each other, it takes a while. On some cases, this can take really long. In a similar way, two mighty rivers joining together may take some time to really come to terms. When the dark blue Rio Negro runs in the muddy brown amazon near Manaus in Brazil, for more than 50 kms they look like two different rivers running in parallel.

Google map of Negro and Amazon joining

And there are many rivers in Konkan/Malabar region which flows only a few kilometers before joining the Sea and it is like the short lived lives of some greats. While watching the end of Chandragiri river, I was thinking of how wonderful it would be to watch the entire stretch of a river. Not just for the joy of watching, but also it would give an amazing perspective about how humans have dependent heavily on these natural beauty. I decided I would try that, possibly on Kaveri, the life line of many people: those who depend on its water, and the politicians who depend on the problem. From Talacauvery to Poompuhar, it goes through a myriad of places and joins some mighty rivers like Kabini and Bhavani, and it will be an interesting aspect to understand how it really enables the living of thousands.

I haven't done much yet on this. Anyone game for w(h)et(t)ing the appetite ?