Going against rivers

TIME changes all the time. At one time our challenge was to save ourselves from the rivers. These rivers swelled in the rainy season, overflowed their banks, and then inundated plains. Time has changed; so has challenge. Now we have to save those rivers from us.

The rivers of this country are being indiscriminately encroached. They are being land- filled and turned into flatlands, their effluent courses vanishing into the multiplying concourse of construction projects. These rivers are being buried alive in their own watery graves. Sadly, greed is swallowing our last relic of depth.

The French say that if one follows the river, one will find the sea. Rivers are an esoteric symbol of life force. They swell and shrink. They move and change. They drown and disgorge. They separate their banks. They connect distant spots.

While some of these are still true, a lot exists in the past. Things have changed because of time. There was a time when life coped with rivers. Now rivers cope with life. Once rivers flooded houses. Now houses flood rivers.

Five thousand years ago the first civilisations emerged along the banks of large rivers: the

Tigris and the Euphrates in Mesopotamia, the Nile in Egypt, the Indus River in India, and the Yellow River in China. In stark contrast, our rivers bear the scars of our uncivilised manners. We treat them as dumping sites for toxic waste. We choke their streams. We fill them up with earth and erase their course.

There must be a reason why God created more water than land. Roughly 71% of the earth's surface is covered by water, and just 0.5% of the planet by weight is water. This is how God must have intended it. This is how He must have thought it should be congenial to life.

Herman Hesse writes in his book Siddhartha how two symbolic elements threaded their way through his hero. One was the river, and another was smile. These elements suggested fluidity as well as the paradoxical union of permanence and flux.

That must be the right mix. Three parts water with one part land produce the flow of rivers and the go of lives. This is how God must have calculated it. This is how this world must have been designed so that streams of rivers and dreams of men run together. Hurtling rivers is a sign of happiness running in our hearts.

For that reason, other nations are striving to save their rivers. Rivers such as Rio Grande and Colorado in the US, the Aral Sea in Russia and deep aquifers in India are fast disappearing. These countries are worried so that they don't draw more water than replenished by Nature.

It's believed that once again civilisations are going to have to hinge on rivers. Energy and water will become factors of the future. Water supplies will be a limiting factor for growth. Energy supplies, which depend on water, are likely to become scarce.

Compared to rest of the world, we aren't only clueless about the danger of killing our rivers. We are also ruthless. The rivers are being gobbled up in length and breadth, their flow either diminished or deflected or disrupted. Many of these rivers have been suffocated, waiting to be strangled anytime to death.

But it's something not to be taken in isolation. Rather it's the devious part of a grievous whole. Ralph Waldo Emerson says: "It's not length of life, but the depth of life." We are going after rivers because, in Herbert Marcus's words, we have become "one-dimensional" men. In the incessant conversion of luxuries into necessities, our aptitude and ability for critical thinking and oppositional behaviour have withered away.

As a result, we have got a new obsession. Height is right in everything for us. Elevation has replaced immersion. Time has changed; so has challenge. Instead of spreading out, we like to be stacked. We worry about rise or fall, not about swim or sink.

What happens to the vanishing rivers? We are erecting tall buildings, ageless streams buried under them. Horizontal rivers connect place with place. But these high-rises are vertical rivers. They connect space with space. The elevators flow inside those buildings. So do streams of people who dream in them.

But we are losing our reference point. How can we appreciate height if we don't know what's depth? Reverse of rivers is stagnation. Inverse of rivers is manipulation. To say it for one last time, time has changed. It has also changed our challenge. Once we hated to be hollow. Now we love to be shallow.

Going against rivers, we are going against life. You need to look at our river barons to know it's true. The robber barons of our time, watch them stooping low on their way up.

Mohammad Badrul Ahsan is a columnist for The Daily Star.
E-mail: badrul151@yahoo.com