As the ground under Nepal and Northern India shakes with
catastrophic consequences, one cannot help reflecting tragically on the lines
composed by Swami Vivekananda in 1898 in Kashmir in his now famous poem ‘Kali
The Mother’:
Come, Mother, come!
For Terror is Thy name,
Death is in Thy breath,
And every shaking step
Destroys a world for e’er.
As a bereaved mother recounts the death under rubble of her
two year-old daughter, as a father anxiously awaits the recovery of the live or
dead bodies of his four children lost to human hope under the debris of his
collapsed home while his wife inconsolably weeps on, one cannot but question
the rudimentary principles of life and living on a planet which itself is
getting hijacked through unknown terrain by unknown forces. What after all is
the stability of life when a slight shift in subterranean tectonic plates sends
civilization reeling for survival under the starry skies, again reminding one
of the epic Vivekananda lines in ‘The Song of the Sannyasin’:
Have thou no home. What home can hold thee, friend?
The sky thy roof, the grass thy bed; and food
What chance may bring, well cooked or ill, judge not.
Today, the whole of Nepal is living outdoors in the care of
Mother Nature as a series of severe after-shocks following the original 7.9
Richter quake on 25 April has rendered them homeless, a nation destituted
overnight while the world witnesses this horrific sight in abject submission to
the grand truth that man is powerless against the fury of Nature. And what
fortitude is on exhibit as these sturdy Himalayan people face the terrible
trial of their individual and collective life with a wistful smile even now
donning their mountain-merry faces and await the call of their numbers or their
dear ones to the kingdom of the dead or perhaps they hang on the hinges of hope
of a brighter day when their lives will again light up with the merriment of
their mountainous mores!
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