Rivers Rivers everywhere...

Image used from The Allegheny Front 

India is a nation of Rivers, plenty of them. Ancient ones, famous ones, notorious ones, nondescript ones, disappeared ones...You name it, we got it!

We named them all nicely, extolled their virtue, made them deities, prayed to them, used them as channels to connect with our ancestors and even grew up playing with them. We believed that life was intricately linked with free flowing water (river) to such an extent that we all felt rivers were running through us! We even got a "Living Person" status for a couple of rivers through High Court of Uttarkhand in 2017 !

Somewhere along our evolutionary learning curve of this eternal flow that was shaped painstakingly by nature over eons, every bend, every swell, every dip, millions of years of work in progress..., we settled down near those rivers and thrived. We used the waters to irrigate fields along the river beds. Whenever it rained, rivers flooded and washed away our settlements and fields. So we switched the pattern, let the river beds be used for irrigation and moved our settlements a tad away from the rivers. Still our fields had to face the wrath of floods at times and lack of water at other times. 

Life was a struggle in 'water sense' - when we had water we flourished and when rivers dried up we broke our heads and somehow 'discovered' water under-ground. Good in Maths we were, we added two and two and summed up that river water feeds other underground structures that could be tapped during lean times (Aquifers was not a known term then. English as a language was not even born then). Thus we found a way to extend good times (read water times) and cultivated even more.

When we had excess water, we prayed for the floods to subside sooner after trying many ways to stop water from washing away our fields.

In this perennial struggle between Man and Nature, a wise king in a little kingdom down south rode in with a very simple, genius solution that would nullify the twin problems of floods and droughts.

He devised a check dam (don't bother to check whether this was the oldest or the fourth oldest or whatever in the world) to 'retain water up to a certain height and let go the excess safely through a different, uninhabited route to Sea'. Mind you, he never wanted to dam up water. He just put a diversion with a spin. The check dam allowed water to be stored and percolation took it to the subsoil land mass nearby. Hence the under-ground water sources started living for longer duration, long enough for us to finish one 'plant-to-harvest cycle'. The harvested produce was more than adequate to feed us till the next rainy season. A researcher who reconstructed the original structure of Grand Anaicut summed up her analysis thus: “ that the old anaicuts worked so well because they sophisticatedly reshaped water currents and sedimentation processes, rather than trying to control all natural elements by force”. This was the thinking of a ruler some 2500 years ago.

What went seriously wrong?

From where did we get the guts to 'control all natural elements by force'? 

Why do we now lament the results our actions have brought upon ourselves but still are hell bent on walking down the same 'thought pipe' to miraculously reverse it all knowing well the world famous quote by Mr. Relativity?: 'Foolishness is repeating the same experiment expecting a different outcome each time'. 

We seriously think interlinking our rivers / reclaiming our rivers (ironically, from ourselves!) / building huge dams and channeling water to regions that are dear to us etc... will solve the problems once and for all?

It all started when we started screwing up Nature - big time, by unplugging ourselves from it...

Little bit of History and Geography peppered with Nature that is beyond both:

River navigation was never the need of the hour for those ancient minds in India that built those marvellous things our current generation keeps quoting gleefully at the drop of the hat, like 'you know, we had pushpaka vimanas thousands of years back'...

Cold air in Mountainous terrains acted as 'rain capture agents' and stored them in the form of snow on Mountains and plains which when thawed by Sun started flowing down down and down till they reached Seas / Lakes. Waters from Seas / Lakes were transported back to Mountains (and way above)  by Mr. Sun the Power King and this was (and is) an endless cycle. What Elon Musk is attempting to do with cutting edge tech is actually not even a speck in front of this giant tech that runs on its own power :-) 

Rivers are complete Eco systems with a simple existence. They flow from high terrains to low terrains constantly nudged by nature. That simple! Nature let loose its creativity on this stream of life giving force and what followed were unbelievable self sustainable Eco systems that rose and died with the flow and ebb of waters.   

Hills and Valleys of our continent saw countless glorious cultures and empires rise and fall but the one true 'undisturbed' thread right through the rich fabric of our ancient history was 'Nature'. We were so connected to nature every breathing moment, we were able to adeptly adapt ourselves to live with it and harness (it) without harming whenever a need arose. 

Life was wondrous. Everything - agriculture, arts, crafts, architecture, governance, trade...everything rose to its own pinnacle and our way of life was looked upon by rest of the humanity that was still afraid of climbing down from those various branches of forest trees they were hanging onto.

This vital connection with nature, that was running through us like the rivers that shaped our terrains, was severed violently by Empires powered by Naval power over a very short stretch of time, just three hundred years...

Mind you, we were the earliest ones to 'harness' the power of nature (seas and winds) but we never occupied any terrain we landed up in those journeys.

Imagine our continent as a giant beating heart, beating one with nature. An unnecessary bye-pass surgery with sophisticated thought process and crude methods was forced upon it, the scars of which are still healing...

In a million tiny cuts, we were forcibly separated from nature and got restitched with western science and philosophies dominated by religions that were not anchored on nature, that put man above nature...

Clueless we were post this surgery, we blindly followed the new path that in a way lead us to the very ruins (or near ruins) that we stand upon. We started attempting to master Nature instead of harnessing it. We cut down trees, swindled mountains, poisoned our waters, altered the course of rivers to suite our greed, polluted our air...all just to 'create' the nature that suites our needs!!!!!

Unlike animals that run off from an unfavourable environment or trees that adapt to live in that environment, we the super-natural creatures 'create' the environment that suites us - cold for some, hot for some...as we like it, all within the same environment.

Like those old black and white / sepia tinted photos of rich royals posing with a gun on their shoulder and a leg on a dead tiger / elephant / lion, almost all of us proudly pose every living moment on a dead river / lake / canal / creek / ridge / forest. 'You see?, We got the BIG ONE!'. 

Cut back to 'Now':

What do we do? What should we do? What must we do?

It takes each of us to make three steps, just three little steps!

As the first thing I say 'get out of that old thought pipe; stop all the din about interlinking rivers, reclaiming rivers, river navigation, one country one water way etc...'. It would never be the solution as each river / creek / lake / pond has a purpose and only one purpose.
Instead, dig up/reclaim the 'once functional, now defunct/ disappeared' (OFNDD - read offend!) water bodies and their pathways. 

As the second thing I say 'Plant trees, billions of them, let them catch the clouds, take water from them down to the very soil they stand on and feed the billions of aquifers that wait underneath their roots. There are aquifers larger then Hoover Dams and Sardar Sarovars underneath the very soil we stand upon'. Amazon is the largest river in earth right? A river much much larger than it runs right underneath it!

As the third thing I say 'Tap the water under your feet when you need, not when you want'! Wells were fantastic systems that acted both ways, as rain water taking (harvesting) systems as well as water giving systems.

I sum up these three steps with just a simple request: 'Reconnect with Nature' to solve most of the man made problems!

I conclude this rather long post with one of the most interesting scientific discoveries of 21st century; Water has memory! It is a giant storehouse of 'who knows what'!

Eminent scientists all over the world have been breaking their heads over the last quarter of a century to understand them and decode them. Google them to start your own discovery!

A byproduct of their discovery is the realization that 'three states of matter' is actually 'four states' and this fourth state could have allowed Jesus to walk on water!!!!!!

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If you have survived reading this far, here are some interesting take aways:

Google the following:

"Cuyahoga river burning". If we really link all our rivers, dump industrial waste on to them and they catch fire ala Cuyahoga, just imagine the scale of catastrophe this would cause...

Also, rivers do disappear! Remember Saraswati? You may find out more about her disappearance in
"The Lost River: On the trail of the river Saraswati by Michael Danino" 

"Sorrow of Bihar. River Kosi" - this river has changed its path multiple times in the last 150 years, once shifting by as much as 120 Kilometers, unleashing devastation on 27 districts in Bihar! 

"Nepals dangerous dams" - am reproducing a couple of passages from this article here:

'Other deadly earthquakes will almost certainly strike the region, and the damage at Rasuwagadhi raises the question of whether a future quake in the Himalayas might precipitate a dam collapse that could send thousands of tons of water and rubble crashing downstream, piling horror upon catastrophe. The likelihood of such an event is growing because, simply put, more and more dams are being built in one of the world’s most active earthquake zones. More than four hundred dams are planned or are under construction in steep Himalayan valleys in China, India, Pakistan, and Bhutan, in one of the biggest waves of dam construction the world has ever seen.'
...
'
Geologists argue that the risks of building dams in earthquake zones go well beyond an earthquake-induced collapse. Earthquakes trigger landslides that can block rivers or change their course, which would also impact the operation of a hydrodam. But the most fiercely debated risk, since the 7.9-magnitude Sichuan earthquake in 2008, which killed seventy thousand people and left nearly twenty thousand missing, is that of “reservoir-induced seismicity”—the theory that the weight of water behind a dam, coupled with the seeping of water into fissures in rocks below, can produce shearing stress strong enough to worsen, or trigger, an earthquake. The Zipingpu dam, a five-hundred-and-eleven-foot-high structure on the Min River and the largest dam in Sichuan Province, was implicated in the 2008 earthquake. Work on the dam began in 2001; it was built just five hundred and fifty yards from the Longmenshan fault line and three miles from the epicenter of the quake.
'
After so much of bad news, some good ones:

Google these:

How India's water man first revived a river and a village in Rajasthan.

An Open letter by Bhaskar Save

700 people 70 days one river

And the best of all things positive!  'The ice stupas of Ladakh' - This is what I meant by 'reconnecting with nature'!!!!