Himalayan Trip-Trap-2

Himalayan Trip-Trap They poured in, before the deluge To surpass the natives in numbers folks in their cribs -through-hearse stages, trusting like kids, a burnished sky, blue-white, a cocktail of the wrong and right, and the mountains, inwardly grumbling , darkly forbidding… Snaking it up to the high spots of primeval Gods, thro roads, loosely wrapping the giant, like gray ribbons, sleeping in structures disputed by the rivers on questions of right of way , they milled about, haggled and honeymooned, peed and pilgrimaged, at Badri and Kedar, belonging to the likes of Sankaras, long before touts and tours stirred their sequestered worlds . And the super giant suddenly fancied a good shower, with unusually heavy cloudbursts , landslides And down flowed decades of filth with silt settling to ceiling heights. The crowds, local and visiting, clung on to life like limpets watching their kin, their life’s bearings, settings and links, uprooted, tossed and broken, hurtling down, Escapees from being buried in debris, now cornered in hell, bereaved and battered, famished and plundered, living and dying from moment to moment on nothing, save air laced with fumes of rotting death at the tipping points of sanity , pondering their turn of fates; development vis-a-vis disasters ; disasters vis-à-vis puny mitigation measures tragedies-in-the-making vis-a-vis remedies forsaken; freak instances vis-à-vis climate changes. They remain stranded , for days on end, despite the IAF, army men and their copters ( not the other services or their detractors) risking their lives on a huge rescuing effort. The natives, rescued or not, stranded for life, though. @24 jun 2013. By :S.Jagathsimhan Nair * This is about the thousands of tourists and locals remaining stranded in the Himalayan heights for about a week now, with dwellings, roads and bridges washed away/ blocked by heavy rains , landslides and floods. Sankara refers to Adi Sankara, the saint of the 8th Cy AD. Badri and Kedar mean Badrinath and Kedarnath, two important places of pilgrimage in the Himalayan heights. IAF : Indian Air Force For Deb’s 'Referential' contest , referring to the loss engendered by the Himalayan geography which finds expression, different, though, in the metaphors of Kash's poem, 'My emotional geography', with ref to expressions like valley of pain, ocean of sorrow, tearful rivers,foggy mountains etc. For SKAT's Epic-only contest.