Furious to Sleepy in 24 hours

Two of the greatest Himalayan rivers Alaknanda and Bhagirathi meet at Devprayag (pic) in Uttaranchal to form the holiest Indian river Ganga. If one stands at the confluence facing downstream, the Alaknanda on the left flows in calm and serene while the Bhagirathi on the right is a study in fury, a huge noisy angry mountain river. You may take a leisurely dip in the Alaknanda, but two metres away towards the right the Bhagirathi might consume you if you put both legs knee deep into the water.

Only till yesterday.

After the third diversion tunnel of the 2,400 MW Tehri Dam project was closed down earlier this week, the water flow on Bhagirathi upstream stopped, putting the furious river to sleep.

Devprayag now has the Alaknanda flowing ever as calmly on the left while on the right there’s only a small stream, the remnant of Bhagirathi. When the Bhagirathi water level began climbing down yesterday, there was however a backflow from the Alaknanda into the Bhagirathi first, where the Alaknanda water ran in to fill in the void in Bhagirathi. Things began to neutralize soon. It would have been an interesting spectacle to witness.

I have spent countless solitary days and nights in Devprayag in a one-room tenement that I visit every year. It's my yearly pilgrimage to nature. During these annual trips, I get up early at 6am, take walk down to the confluence, past the suspension bridge over Bhagirathi. That early in the morning, there’s daybreak on Alaknanda while a few yards on the right the Bhagirathi valley just kisses goodbye to the morning twilight.

After a breakfast of bread and goat-butter with very sweet tea I walk up along the Alaknanda to the higher part of Devprayag town and meet up with some locals that I have made friends there over the years. They tell me proudly that their sons travel 80 kms to and fro everyday ‘to learn computer course at NIIT Haridwar centre’.

When the sun is out and over above, I cross over the confluence from the bridge over Alaknanda to the little island with the abandoned clocktower. Nobody visits this clocktower yet it is always spotlessly clean and you don’t even have to brush the dust off the benches around it to sit. I don’t know how this happens.

After lunch at the bus stand, watching buses from Haridwar and Rishikesh travel diligently up the highway to their destinations at Gangotri, Kedarnath or Badrinath, it is back to my room for a quick nap or some reading.

At the first hint of sundown I trek up one of the many hills around the confluence. From the top of one of the hill, drinking very sweet tea made by a villager, the confluence looks like two small lines of termites coming together to join a single file.

At night, I have dinner with the 75-year-old owner of my tenement. As usual, I have thousand questions to ask about him about Uttaranchal, its culture, people, potential and development. I get my answers spoken in the hill dialect, interspersed with much lore, stories of ghosts and banshees, tigers and leopards, the woman who turned into a tree, et al.

All this will still be possible, but the deafening roar of the Bhagirathi’s fury in the background will be missing.

It is a small price to pay, for Tehri Dam brings with it electricity and economic benefits that will help this backward state greatly.

There has been much propaganda by the media and so-called-environmentalists against this dam, accompanied by claims of earthquake danger by ‘conservationists’ who know zilch about seismology or rock mechanics and everything about impassioned speeches and James Joyce type writing. The truth is that if you travel upstream along the Bhagirathi valley, the locals will tell you how eagerly they have been waiting for Tehri Dam.