The river runs through them

A good deal of patriotic commotion was created in Bangalore when Kannada film stars took to the street asking that the supply of Cauvery water to Tamil Nadu be stopped.

As if on cue, Tamil film stars have announced a rally in Neyveli to demand that the supply of electricity to Karnataka be stopped. This is how two plus two add up to twenty-two.

If we had politicians capable of seeing beyond one day, they would have seen that there is a huge big crisis facing all of us, and that we can only meet it by all of us standing together.

Early last year scientists told us that El Nino, a climate phenomenon that disrupts rainfall patterns worldwide, had been more intense lately than in the past 130,000 years.

These climate changes, they said, could cause ‘‘unprecedented social disruptions’’. There was mounting evidence to suggest that early bronze civilisations of Palestine, Greece and Crete all peaked in 2300 BC, then declined when catastrophic drought and cooling struck a decade or so later. Mesopotamian societies also collapsed due to severe drought.

Rains failed in most parts of India this year and vast areas of Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Andhra and Orissa are in the grip of devastating drought. Western Madhya Pradesh and Orissa saw waves of mass migration last year. People without water turn desperate—and violent. Villagers in Rajasthan last year attacked Food Corporation godowns.

Worse may be coming. With man refusing to control pollution (America, the world’s greatest polluter, refuses even to cooperate with other countries), the world is getting hotter. This means the great ice shelves of the Antarctic are collapsing. Reports last March said that one shelf had already broken into thousands of icebergs. This shelf was said to have been 12,000 years old weighing 720 billion tonnes.

We cannot even conceptualise such sizes—and such dangers. But here’s something we can. Last century sea levels in Venice rose by one step of a staircase. This century they are expected to rise by five steps. An additional cause for Venice’s sinking is the draining of underground water table due to industrialisation.

The water table in our cities has also been going lower and lower. When ocean levels rise, Tuvalu in the Pacific Ocean will be the first to go under the waves. Citizens of that country are already migrating to New Zealand. Will citizens of Maldives crowd into Kerala? Will another mass migration from Bangladesh turn West Bengal upside down?

No politician, or film star, need worry about such questions. For drought and rising sea levels will not devour our civilisation before the next general elections. And who cares what happens after the election? So, fight on Tamil Nadu. Fight on Karnataka. And don’t ever watch Titanic. It’s not that there will be no victor at all in this war. There certainly is one, already—Veerappan.