Skip to main content

Where rocks sing


Some places retain their pristine beauty in spite of human presence. Ezhattumukham is one such place just 12 km from Cochin International Airport. Literally the name of the place means the mouth of seven rivers. Maybe in the heyday of Kerala's monsoon, one could see those seven debouches clearly. What I saw the other day, when I landed there rather by chance along with Maggie, is an elaborate spread of granite boulders and chains of rocks with puddles of water in between. Of course, the river is dammed up keeping all the water on the other side and channeling part of it for irrigation. 

The place has a quaint charm even with all those rocks and boulders. As Alice Walker said, in nature nothing is perfect and everything is perfect. Even the contorted trees with all their bizarre bends and twists have a perfection that arrests your attention. Those contortions can tell you stories. Some of those stories will resonate with your own inner distortions. 


A hanging bridge connects the opposite banks of the river. Like a poem that stretches beneath your feet with an inhuman humility. It struggles to suppress its shakes and tremors as footfalls span its constriction. 


From the bridge you can see the dam across the river. Well, it's not a dam in the sense you are familiar with. A chain of rocks has been converted into a barrage to direct the water into two irrigation canals, one on each side of the river. 


You land from the hanging bridge into an elegant park that has quite many bowers for young lovers. You can see romance blossoming there as you move along the tessellated walkways by the side of one of the irrigation canals. 


Though there were quite many visitors the day I landed in this place, the absence of man-made filth was conspicuous. You won't find plastic bottles and food wraps and aluminum foils and cigarette packs and beer cans and even spittle blotches. Humanity isn't as filthy as you thought!

We are capable of preserving paradises too! The realisation consoled me with a feeling of redemption. Ezhattumukham is infinitely more ennobling than churches and temples with all their gods and divine battalions. 


PS. This post is part of Blogchatter's CauseAChatter




Comments

  1. Absolutely! I have found the silence of nature a whole lot more relaxing than any temple.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Nowadays places of worship are places of wars! Nature still has some sanctity,mercifully.

      Delete
  2. Welcome to God's own country. God's own Paradise is lost to India anyway.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Looks like a lovely serene place to visit.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Nice to know about Ezhattumugham. I love what I see in the first picture. Rocky places have a beauty of their own. :)

    ReplyDelete
  5. I was happy to read that there was no garbage left behind, too often our pristine places are defiled by those humans who think the whole wide world is a garbage dump!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. One good thing I notice as I travel in Kerala is precisely this civic sense that is conspicuous here.

      Delete
  6. It is rare to find such places of untouched beauty. Lovely pictures!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. It's indeed a great place. Something out of the way.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

Relatives and Antidepressants

One of the scenes that remain indelibly etched in my memory is from a novel of Malayalam writer O V Vijayan. Father and little son are on a walk. Father tells son, “Walk carefully, son, otherwise you may fall down.” Son: “What will happen if I fall?” Father: "Relatives will laugh.” I seldom feel comfortable with my relatives. In fact, I don’t feel comfortable in any society, but relatives make it more uneasy. The reason, as I’ve understood, is that your relatives are the last people to see any goodness in you. On the other hand, they are the first ones to discover all your faults. Whenever certain relatives visit, my knees buckle and the blood pressure shoots up. I behave quite awkwardly. They often describe my behaviour as arising from my ego, which used to be a oversized in yesteryear. I had a few such visitors the other day. The problem was particularly compounded by their informing me that they would be arriving by about 3.30 pm and actually reaching at about 7.30 pm. ...

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...

The Ugly Duckling

Source: Acting Company A. A. Milne’s one-act play, The Ugly Duckling , acquired a classical status because of the hearty humour used to present a profound theme. The King and the Queen are worried because their daughter Camilla is too ugly to get a suitor. In spite of all the devious strategies employed by the King and his Chancellor, the princess remained unmarried. Camilla was blessed with a unique beauty by her two godmothers but no one could see any beauty in her physical appearance. She has an exquisitely beautiful character. What use is character? The King asks. The play is an answer to that question. Character plays the most crucial role in our moral science books and traditional rhetoric, religious scriptures and homilies. When it comes to practical life, we look for other things such as wealth, social rank, physical looks, and so on. As the King says in this play, “If a girl is beautiful, it is easy to assume that she has, tucked away inside her, an equally beauti...