Thursday, May 06, 2010

Cannot. Ignore.

April 2010 Special Issue. Only English magazine at the news stand, and it had to be this. *Reinforcement of April's concerns*.

5 comments:

pangolin said...

meanwhile, it's raining all the time in France. I could trade a couple of clouds for a sunny day.

amruta patil said...

nico: oui, je sais. i am looking at your grey moisture-laden skies even as i type. god bless the hexagon, we'll take any surplus raincloud or river! kaliyug isn't synchronized the world over, and despite seasonal media hysteria, in some parts of the world, it's hard to even believe the urgency of matters on a day-to-day basis.

one of the things i'm really grateful to india for is the fact that she shines uncomfortable truths straight in the eyes.

in 1987, the family visited friends in saurashtra, gujarat. the town we were in was afflicted with acute water shortage that summer. with all eight-year-old high-handedness, i declared that i didn't care for the strange-tasting water or the rationed bucket-baths; and that where i lived we bathed with bucket after bucket of luscious water and even washed our courtyards. shivani, my twelve-year-old host, looked at me and said, "one day you will know better." the chill of that quiet response has stayed in my bones for twenty four years.

Kabir said...

Yes indeed. I try not to ever waste any water by using used clothes-wash and mouth cleaning water etc for flushing the toilet and regret that, unlike some intelligent people in say, Coimbatore in south India, i have not yet installed water-harvesting devices at home in Delhi.
Interesting thought that water represents the feeling function and that in general so many of us have buried our nobler sentiments like tenderness and compassion under a welter of aggression and superficiality and polluted our ponds, streams lakes rivers and oceans. As the soul grows parched and thirsty,so our geographic hinterlands, rivers and glaciers dry up. "We are the world" says indian sage Krishnamurti. Just look at us now.
For me the great poets provide watery succour and the heart begins to peep out at a wider world. Poetic water-harvester could be a decent, if ill-paid livelihood.

amruta patil said...

A livelihood you'd be well suited to eke out, Kabira.

Kahe Kabira Suno Bhai said...

Water doesn't leave one alone. When Wordsworth began to survey the landscape of his life in 1798 during a cold winter spent in Germany aged 28, the first thing which he remembered was a river, the Derwent,in England's Lake District which he hailed as a source of beneficence and peace, an influence going back beyond conscious memory, a presence which
"loved to blend his murmurs with my nurse's song...And from his fords and shallows sent a voice that flowed along my dreams". He always lovingly thanked that river for its gift of "ceaseless music" from its steady-flowing stream. This helped him see in our humanbeingness a "bond of union betwixt life and joy".

Apparently this universe is said to end in fiery conflagration. May we revere and enjoy nectar-like water with gratitude while we can. O you fellow bloggers out there, am i communicating or not?