The crisis is almost here to haunt us

If you wish to raise a glass of wine in salute, and make the toast in Hebrew, you give voice to words from far ancient times — L’chaim. It is pronounced La-haim, meaning ‘To Life’.

I think the time has come for us to make the toast every morning to ourselves and to those with us, with a glass of water. Perhaps it will remind us how precious those drops are, and how scarce it is becoming. While we were distracted by our socio-political turmoil, war of words, or the clash of ideals, our manna was being sucked out of this earth, dried out from the skies and melted from our mountains. We are looking into a Mad Max-like future, and it appears now that the nightmare will step out of the big screen and turn into our reality not too far away.

As school kids trot off to the first day of school, the monsoon always came in to ruin the shine on the brand-new shoes and white school uniforms. But it is July now, and the whole month of June went by without significant rain. The monsoon with its resonant thunderstorms and forbidding black skies is only a memory from last year. If July is scarce, too, I wonder what will happen to us for the rest of the year.

As I cycle around the villages near my home, scarcely do I go more than a couple of kilometres before I find a borewell that pumps out water into a tanker, which then carts it off into the city for thirsty apartment complexes. All too often, the din of another new borewell rig pierces your eardrums.

In those moments I often think of these monstrosities as giant spears piercing the flesh of Mother Earth, trying to suck the marrow out of her body. Many of you may not think in the hyperbole as I tend to, but I hope you catch the drift.

If the rain doesn’t come and the earth dries up, where will we go for water?

In school, we were taught that the rivers in the northern parts of India were perennial rivers that flow year-round, because their source was not always rainfall, but also the melting Himalayan glaciers.

A few months back, trekking in the mountains above Gaumukh, the primary source of the Ganga, I saw erosion lines on the mountain-side a few kilometres long. It has taken 200 years for the glacier to recede 3 km, but the rate has escalated alarmingly since 1971 to about 22 metres a year.

They say it is only going to be a few decades more before they evaporate into nothingness.

If the northern rivers are in jeopardy from the disappearing Himalayan snow cover and the southern ones are parched from absent rainfall, where will we go for freshwater?

In the beautiful city I live in, we have lost 80% of our green cover and wetlands in just 50 years. Translating this in terms of numbers that we can crunch, this would be like walking along in a wooded area with an electric saw, to chop down four trees and leave only the fifth one standing. Imagine the woods after that — the empty skyline, the homeless birds, the scorching sun on the ground and the all-pervasive heat and dust. This fear may not belong to a remote dystopian future anymore. If the monsoon doesn’t come to our land soon, this could well be our present.

Suddenly, toasting with a tumbler of water ‘To Life’ doesn’t seem all that far- fetched.

drhemanair@gmail.com