Green in Boiling Cauldron: Readings into Paandu’s Poojyathin Rajyam (Tamil)

Abstract

Even though Green literature largely talks about jungles, forests, green mountains and water bodies and the solace these offer to the ones that go and live in the lap of nature just as Henry David Thoreau did a century ago in the US, the present paper has nothing to do with the scintillating aspect of Nature and Ecology, but the loss of such greenery and the modern man’s apathy to it. None the less, there is a renewed awareness in the summit forums of the world these days as the earth is heating up day by day and the fossil fuels get depleted at a fast tempo. The fragile Ozone layer is punctured in many places just as the tarpaulin sheet of a modern refugee camp in the Middle East and Europe. Sensitive individuals especially the poets have raised their concerns through their voices which seldom reach the thick-skinned politicians. Politicians and bureaucrats do not live for tomorrow; they are concerned about their to-days. But litterateurs, cross all boundaries and raise a big hue and cry against the mindless exploitation of natural wealth like the large-scale pulling out of granites and marbles, oil, coal, wood and water, to list a few resources. Green is going grey, nay, in the cauldron and will be no more by green. One of the South Indian Tamil poets who beautifully captures this is Paandu with his composition Poojyathin Rajyam.