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. SuchitaFebruary 3, 2021 at 12:59 PM

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

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalFebruary 3, 2021 at 1:28 PM

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

      Delete
  2. Tomichan MatheikalFebruary 3, 2021 at 6:23 PM

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

    ReplyDelete
  3. Rajeev MoothedathFebruary 4, 2021 at 7:59 PM

    Looks like a lovely serene place to visit.

    ReplyDelete
  4. dee NambiarFebruary 5, 2021 at 11:59 PM

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

    ReplyDelete
  5. Harshita NandaFebruary 8, 2021 at 1:06 PM

    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. Tomichan MatheikalFebruary 10, 2021 at 12:27 PM

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

      Delete
  6. SatabdiFebruary 14, 2021 at 9:59 PM

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

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalFebruary 15, 2021 at 9:21 AM

      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
47 comments
Read more

Insecurity and Exclusivism

“ Hindu khatare mein hai.” This was one of the first slogans that accompanied the emergence of Narendra Modi on the national scene. It means Hindus are in Danger . It reveals a deep-rooted feeling of insecurity. Hindus constitute an overwhelming majority in India – 80%. All the high positions in governance, judiciary, academics, any significant place, are occupied by Hindus. Yet the slogan was born. Strange? It will be facile to argue that Modi used this slogan and its concomitant hatred of Muslims and Christians as a political weapon for winning votes. True, he was successful in that; he rose to the highest political post in the country using minority-bashing. But the hatred did not end with that achievement; rather it spread outward and became more exclusive. Muslim and European rulers of India were booted out from the country’s history books and wherever else possible like the names of roads and institutions. With vengeance. Now there is a concerted effort going on to place In...
12 comments
Read more

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...
16 comments
Read more

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...
19 comments
Read more

You Don’t Know the Sky

I asked the bird to lend me wings. I longed to fly like her. Gracefully. She tilted her head and said, “Wings won’t be of any use to you because you don’t know the sky.” And she flew away. Into the sky. For a moment, I was offended. What arrogance! Does she think she owns the sky? As I watched the bird soar effortlessly into the blue vastness, I began to see what she meant. I wanted wings, not the flight. Like wanting freedom without the responsibility that comes with it. The bird had earned her wings. Through storms, through hunger, through braving the odds. She manoeuvred her way among the missiles that flew between invisible borders erected by us humans. She witnessed the macabre dance of death that brought down cities, laid waste a whole country. Wings are about more than flights. How often have you perched on the stump of a massive tree brought down by a falling warhead and wept looking at the debris of civilisations? The language of the sky is different from tha...
13 comments
Read more