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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.
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