As Cauvery Sankramana approaches, devotees will once again climb to Talakaveri to witness the sacred spring rise, and carry its water home. For Kodavas, this is the day the river is born. It is also the best moment to ask our children a harder question: what, exactly, are we celebrating?
The Cauvery exists because the forest holds the rain, releases it slowly, and feeds the streams that eventually reach millions downstream. Kodagu is not just beautiful. It is a watershed, and a fragile one. To honour the river as a goddess while neglecting the hills that give birth to her is to mistake the ritual for the faith.
The summers of 2018 and 2019 taught this the hard way. Hillsides gave way, homes and coffee estates were buried, and families who had lived here for generations lost everything in hours. Our children remember those monsoons. They watched roads vanish and relatives displaced. The question is whether we let that memory harden into fear or turn it into understanding.
That is our duty as adults. Children do not inherit an ecosystem; they inherit our habits. When a child sees a grown-up fell a shade tree for quick profit, leave plastic and offerings’ packaging at the sangama, or cut a slope without thought for drainage, the lesson is absorbed more deeply than any textbook can teach. Pilgrimage season, with its crowds and its litter, is when that lesson is most visible.
Kodagu’s own tradition already holds the answer. The devarakadu, the sacred groves protected by our ancestors, were conservation long before the word existed. Rituals like Kailpodh and Puthari tie the community to land and harvest. Our elders knew that reverence is the strongest form of protection.
So what should we do?
Take children to Talakaveri, and teach them to leave it clean. Carry cloth bags and steel bottles, carry back every wrapper, and let them see you do it.
Explain the river before the ritual. Tell them the spring is the visible end of a hidden system of roots, soil, and shola forest.
Tree-planting with follow-up care, stream monitoring, and talks by farmers and foresters make the lesson local and real.
Let elders speak. Grandparents hold knowledge about rainfall, seeds, and sacred groves that no curriculum records.
Practise what we preach. Segregate waste, stop plastic at the source, protect water sources, and plant native species.
Explain the why. Deforestation, unchecked construction, and slope-cutting raise landslide risk, while forests, roots, and wetlands protect us.
Awareness without action is only worry. Children who plant a sapling, clean a stream bank, or watch a hornbill return learn that they are guardians, not bystanders.
This Sankramana, let us carry home more than a bottle of holy water. Let us carry a promise to protect what the water comes from. The hills gave our forefathers water, wood, and livelihood. They ask little in return: care. If we teach our children to give it, the Cauvery will keep flowing and the hills will stay green.
The classroom for this lesson is the forest outside the window. It is time we opened the door….
By Reshma Gowramma Machamada.
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