as the River flows : let’s talk about the river…
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Even today, as the plane is about to land in Guwahati & I see the vast mass of water flowing below, my heart is surged with emotions that I am unable to assign words to… during my childhood, while growing up in different parts of Assam, I subconsciously started relating Guwahati with that river.
I am talking about the river Brahmaputra here – one of the very few male river in the world. From the romantic lover who embraces the golden hue of sun in the lazy winter evening to the angry old man threatening those who dare to disturb his solitude in the monsoon, I have seen him in all his moods. Truly an international river – out of its 2880 km length, 1625 km lies in China, 918 km in India and 337 km in Bangladesh. This river undoubtedly has a million stories which he shares with those who care to take the time off…
I was thinking whether my river shares the same stories with the Chinese girl who sits by the bank of this fast moving mountain river and call him ‘Tsangpo’. Or with the old man, who rows his boat down the lazy waves through the plains of Bangladesh and calls him ‘Jamuna’ or by some other name….
But is it only the river Brahmaputra who insists on telling the stories to the willing listeners? Sitting in the bench on a cold January morning in Frankfurt and looking at the semi-frozen river Main, I was thinking what stories this river might be telling to her willing listeners… what kind of emotions she might give rise to the German boy or girl who looks at her from above, as their plane is about to land in Frankfurt… Can the emotion be any different because they are looking at this calm, semi-frozen river as against the misleading Brahmaputra, who for all his outwardly calm nature has one of the strongest undercurrents in the world???
Quite a stupid question, I presume. It is like comparing the wound of a person to whom tears come easily to the wound of somebody (like me) who almost find it impossible to shade a tear… Does it mean that one is feeling the pain more because the tear is following freely as against somebody whose tears have almost frozen?? The expression may have a very diverse sphere, but the emotions have a universal language…
Then why these divide? Why all of us are hell bent on proving that my country/region/state/city/village is better than yours?? Why it is always have to be me OR you?? How much longer will it take for us to understand that we have but just one planet???
As I shared with you before, I sincerely believe it is just incidental that ‘as the River flows’ happen to be set in Assam…Sridhar Ranjan could have gone missing from any part of the world… For me, Sridhar Ranjan doesn’t stand for a person – it represents something much larger. It represents the hope, the dream each one of us had about the world we live in as we were growing up – but somewhere along the way from ‘our world’ it became ‘my world’…
Bidyut
Tags: As The River Flows
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bravo!!
bawal hai qasam se!! its been a long time since i read something this good here!!
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