A letter to the ‘encroachers’ of the city
Dear 'encroachers',
Encroach the lake bunds, tribal lands, river banks and block the key waterways. Your mansions and ashrams can also block the elephant corridors. But you should display the muscle power of a trumpeting elephant. If you do so, you don't need to be afraid of being evicted from your quarters. Like a teddy in your child's hand, the ‘Almighty’ would join a game with you and turn a blind eye to the polluted, stagnant patches of the river across the city. Though the Omnipresent who caught even the sacred river Ganga on His brow and checked its flow from His matted locks, with his avatar as 'Patteeswara' can watch watch the dead Noyyal beside His shrine at Perur.
Also with the participation of thousands of devotees, if you celebrate the pompous throughout the night, the ‘supreme deity’ is sure to shield you from everything as legal notices, government, and court orders. But being strengthless, you are evicted now. The bulldozers have razed down your memories of life and reduced them into mere heaps of rubble on the lake bund. Because you are not Gods to own the paths of rivers and wild animals.
You may wonder whether none has encroached the lake bunds in the history of our city. For your information, not just lake bunds, but many had encroached even lakes. Nevertheless, you cannot trace the lakes or 'kulams' either inside 'Puliyakulam' or 'Ammankulam' now. You may also question why a government bus depot in the city still stands on the part of a large tank. If you are trustworthy to any expert official from the government department concerned, preferably a retired one, he may inform you of the roles played by the bigshots, bureaucrats, and politicians to legally justify such encroachments in the past.
You are the esteemed residents of Coimbatore, which is synonymous with the sweet Siruvani water. But before its arrival after the painful tasks taken by the two stalwarts SP Narasimhalu Naidu and CS Rathina Sabapathy Mudaliar, the city had been unfit for human life with its acute shortage of drinking water.
You claim that you had lived on the lake bunds for about a century and remember your grandparents and great grandparents. But, you may not know it was your ancestors, who had been brought from different places, that toiled hard inside the deep woods of the Western Ghats and piped here the Siruvani water from the wild streams. Indeed, the tanks in Coimbatore had once been the water resources of the town until the arrival of Siruvani. However, the gush of the tasty water soon made the local body forget the lakes. Your forgotten ancestors too, with little work to do and have no interest to return to their native, settled on the bunds of the forgotten lakes. They were not evicted then since the city had no such 'missions' of making the city smart.
After the recent eviction from the lake bund, you demanded a piece of land to construct your home within the city limits. Instead, you would rather have asked the same to construct and consecrate a temple. Such a piece of land was granted when the residents of Rathina Sabapathy Puram requested it to construct the Rathina Vinayagar Temple. The trader Syrian Christians from Kerala, who too settled in Rathina Sabapathy Puram then, obtained a piece of land and constructed the Syrian Church, as read from a book on the history of R.S Puram. At the same time, the denizens of the posh RS Puram disliked having their homes near the 'burial ground' behind the Rathina Vinayagar Temple and had it moved southwest to Muthannan Kulam, on whose bund you lived for years.
'Encroachers' of Muthannan Kulam, your colony was not as shapely as RS Puram, whose rectangular layouts are like pieces of neatly-cut Mysurpa, as imagined by the author of the book. Your houses and lanes were unplanned and shapeless like your varied everyday hurries for survival.
Will the 'almighty' show the same verve and undo the other encroachers of our 'kulams' and 'rivers'? Probably not as they are not as strengthless as you.
Tomorrow, the selfie point on the lake bund will have the caption 'I love Kovai' with the word 'love' being represented by the image of a heart. But, who will know the image is none other than your child's teardrop, after losing its teddy in the rubble?