The Glance and Dance of Fire: A Blind Race Towards the Edge

 **8 June 2003**

Sweltering heat, global warming and greenhouse gas emission issues need not be debated. We need concrete steps.

Maybe we have, in our blind developmental pursuits, already done irreversible, irremediable damage to the environment.

Maybe we are in for a prolonged agony.

Try to—futilely—find solutions to one set of problems while another one gets hatched.

These first eight days of June have been unbearably hot.

This semi-arid locality, dotted with brick houses and monopolised by agricultural farms, is almost under fire.

In the afternoons, everything seems on the verge of melting.

Deserts must be eyeing the steaming spectacle with glee and greed, for it is the new coloniser across the world.

The glaciers feeding the majestic myth and holiness of Maa Ganga are on the perpetual decrease.

It is just a matter of some years when the incessant flow of the holy river will remain a muddy, polluted seasonal channel which will no longer be able to carry the weight of sins and faiths of millions.

Ghastly, unremitting, blind, merciless monotony of our modernist path will choke the lively, hilariously lolloping, silvery, mirthing maiden running curvaceously across the bosom of the mighty father.

We will thus, hot-tempered under a hot sun, rob the divinity of its long-standing tools.

Godliness will look too obsolete in that barren, charmless face of Earth.

It will scorn wistfully, perpetually, with chiding, poking derision from the misty, cool, compassionate world.

In varied and variegated uncertainty closets of Mother Earth, we are happily, involuntarily moving into the glance and dance of fire and furnaces to be moulded from our human rawness into superhuman metal cast.

It certainly is not devolution which nature had chalked out for itself.

It is the blind mutation in the ideas in the brains of a constituent of the species sharing the Earth that has checkmated or condemned evolution to turn it along its utilitarian paths.

But the strong forces drawing the chariot of his ideas have gone awry everywhere, and now it seems almost a blind race which will surely take the champion over the edge into the deep gorges.