Rivers

 Rivers are like family in the Indian folklore. Most often, they are equated with the mother principle. In a way, both at the denotative/dictionary meaning and the connotative/suggestive signification, a river is like the mother figure. She is the source of the very concept of nutrition in every which way, from food to the formation of the personality. 

Just as a baby needs a mother figure, a budding civilization needs a river, for potable water, for irrigation, for transport, and so on. Hence the deification of rivers. Even the Ganga myth has as its base the nurturing of mankind motif.

Most interestingly, the Ganges, despite its breadth at places, never ever loses its feminine nurturing metaphor. The Brahmaputra, rather like the German word for a river, der Fluss, is accorded a masculine identity. In fact, trans-nationally, rivers like the Danube,  the Rhine or the Mississipi or the Amazon show how generous and bountiful nature is beyond the artificial man-made boundaries and borders.

Yet another characteristic of rivers is that in every form, they are beautiful; as the translucent brook near the source, as the tributary merging with the sister river, as the estuary about to enter the sea or the ocean, as the waterfall jumping over every hurdle. Not only are these versions gorgeous, each one of them teaches us  symbolically a great ethical principle, transparency, quietly merging and mixing with the context, managing and transcending every obstacle in the path, and so on.

Unfortunately, currently rivers are dying due to various such reasons as excessive industrialisation, uncontrolled urbanisation resulting in changing the very course of a river, making river beds into narrowed dumping grounds, unthinking dams, and so on. No wonder, come monsoon and rivers in spate spitefully explode furiously beyond banks. Hence the urgent need for a thought through, futuristic and environment friendly vision for clean rivers that are fluid temples enshrining the flora, the fauna and mankind 'bank'ing by them!

Pratima@ Rivers are  ever permanent and  yet constantly transient. No wonder, "you never step in to the same river twice", said  sagely Heraclitus!