Every year around this season, devotees gather at Talakaveri, on the slopes of Brahmagiri, to watch the Cauvery rise from the sacred spring. For Kodavas, she is Kaveramme, a mother, not aresource. Science, in its own language, says something similar: this humble spring is where a great river begins.
Look closely at what rises from that spring. H2O: two atoms of hydrogen, one of oxygen, bound in a tiny bent molecule. That small shape gives water an odd gift. another and to almost everything else, which is why it climbs from root to leaf in a coffee plant, dissolves minerals from the hills, and carries them down to the fields below. No other liquid on Earth does so much for life.
And no drop is ever new. The water in Kaveramme has been rain, cloud,and sea many times over. The monsoon lifts it from the Arabian Sea, the Western Ghats force it to rise and fall as rain, and our sholas and grasslands soak it up like a sponge, releasing it slowly through the dry months. The forest is not scenery. It is the river’s storage tank.
Here is the odd thing about being the source. The first drop is ours, but it never stays.
Kaveramme has kept her promise. Year after year, through showers of rain that drum on our tiled roofs and swell every stream in Kodagu, she has come back. Even when the rains fall short, she does not abandon us. She gives and she asks for nothing in return.
Molecules carry no passports. Yet every dry year the Cauvery dispute returns to courtrooms, with each side counting tmc feet as though a river could be portioned like a family inheritance. Both have real needs. But somewhere in the arithmetic, we forget that water belongs first to thirst, and only then to maps.
Water obeys physics, not preference. What differed was who could rebuild quickly, and who waited months for help.
Even in a land of abundant rain, not everyone drinks equally. Some hamlets struggle for clean water each summer while the hills around them stay green. Rain falls on all of Kodagu. The tap does not reach all of Kodagu.
If we call the Cauvery our mother, we cannot claim her only when she is gentle, or share her only with those who look like us. Protecting the shola forests, streams, and wetlands is not fashionable environmentalism. It is what a custodian owes.
So the next time we fold our hands at Talakaveri, we might ask a harder question than “Will the river bless us?” Perhaps it is this: Are we worthy of what she gives so freely?
Reshma Gowramma Machamada
Join our WhatsApp Group for News and Article Alerts
