Water, the elixir of life

Sukumaran C. V.

Man has through ages sought in vain for an imaginary elixir of life, the divine Amrita, a draught of which was thought to confer immortality. But the true elixir of life lies near to our hands. For it is the commonest of all liquids, plain water! —C. V. Raman.

In the past when there were hundreds of acres of paddy fields in my village, whenever I have been in the fields, I used to remember the title of an essay written by India’s greatest scientist C. V. Raman—Water, the  Elixir of Life—which was the first lesson in the English textbook of my Pre-Degree class. It is from that essay I learnt the meaning of the word elixir and whenever I watched the pure waters gurgling through the kazhaya from one field to the other, I used to tell myself— the elixir of life. 

In our mythology there is a word called amritu and I thought it was only a mythical imagination until I learnt the essay. Then I could see water is really the amritu and our paddy fields, the wetlands, were doing great service to the humans and other animals by preserving the elixir of life. There was a little creek alongside the paddy fields and even in the summer months pure water used to flow through it. Along the banks of the creek, screw-pines grew in abundance and water could be seen trickling down from their roots.  And summers have never been as scorching as they are now.

Today our district (Palakkad) is parching and scorching under the summer sun. As all the indigenous trees which absorb the UV rays are felled and uprooted, the level of UV rays are unprecedentedly high. The older people say that they have never experienced such scorching heat in their life. Rivers have dried up and the still remaining ponds are drying up. As we have deserted paddy cultivation and converted almost all the paddy fields to plots and estates and felled and uprooted every big tree, there are now no wetlands to preserve the rainwater; and no trees to absorb the scorching heat and protect the birds, humans and other animals. 

Everybody complaints about the heat and drinking water shortage, but nobody notices the dried up water bodies and ponder over the reason of their drying up. Along the banks of our village creek there is not even a single tree or screw-pine bush now and there is not a drop of water in the creek either. Water used to ooze into the creek from the wetlands, the paddy fields, and the water was preserved by the roots of the screw-pine bushes and indigenous trees. 

Now the wetlands were gone, the screw-pine bushes gone, the trees gone and is it possible for the water alone to remain? All of these are inter-related, and the humans, blinded by their selfish greed, forgot the interconnection. They converted the wet lands into dry-lands, destroyed the thickets and trees, and discovered that water also disappeared together with the ecosystem they have destroyed. 

Now the humans are suffering, but the brunt of the suffering is borne by the poor who are not part of the onslaught on the ecosystem. And the birds and animals also suffer.
Jungle babblers, bulbuls, mynahs, and other birds need water in summer not only to drink, but to bathe also. It is my wont to put a tub of water in front of our home for the birds to drink and bathe. And it is always a wonderful experience to watch birds drink and bathe. They never quarrel while sharing the water. I have seen even woodpeckers drink and bathe from the tub! Jungle babblers, bulbuls, mynahs, orioles and magpie-robins come regularly. 

When the jungle babblers drink and bathe, if a bulbul comes, it will wait patiently until the jungle babblers finished quenching their thirst and taking bath. I have not seen any bird attacking others on the matter of sharing the water!! There is no fight over the water either between two birds of the same feathers or between different kinds of birds. They behave themselves and show wonderful manners. No policing is need!
Jungle babblers are the birds who repeatedly bath and they always come in large numbers. It seems that they are highly social birds. Mynahs, bulbuls, orioles magpie-robins and other birds come in pairs. 

In our district, there are people who have to walk miles to fetch drinking water. While even the humans have no drinking water what will the birds do? (Of course ours is an anthropocentric world!). The stupid humans still think that everything was created for them. They are still unable to learn the truth behind the scathing satire of Jonathan swift.

In his Gulliver’s Travels, Swift describes Man as the most dangerous of all animals. In the second book of the satire (A Voyage to Brobdingnag) Swift’s bitter contempt of mankind finds its most articulate expression in the remark made by the emperor of Brobdingnag to Gulliver: “But by what I have gathered from your own relation, and the answers I have with much pains wrung and extorted from you, I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.” (Italics added)

 
As C. V. Raman says, “there is nothing which adds so much to the beauty of the countryside as water, be it just a little stream or a little pond by the wayside where the cattle quench their thirst…..The rainfed tanks that are so common in South India—alas often so sadly neglected in their maintenance—are a cheering sight….Water in a landscape may be compared to the eyes in a human face.”

In the name of ‘development’ we have blinded the eyes, and we are groping in the darkness of a drought-like situation. We are reaping what we have sown.