Some sentences, like some people, live on in your memory. Among those that linger in my mind is one that stands out for its innate poetry as well as its truth. It goes, “Where there is a river or sea in your growing up, you probably always hear it”.

I grew up in the beautiful Western coast of India, described today as “God’s Own Country”. The sea was just a mile away from home, but you did not have to be on its shores to hear it.

All the time, and especially during the monsoon, you could hear its ceaseless roar. Today, living as I do in the heart of the peninsula, I can recollect it with perfect ease, because it is so like the beat and pound of my own heart. And this is perhaps the reason why I have such a deep reverence for water.

The face of water is not always benign. It can be especially savage during floods. However, many of its manifestations bring joy and solace to the soul.

I have sat for long stretches of time on the beach watching the ebb and flow of waves and, eventually, slipping with the setting sun into a peaceful mood.

Rain too has me fascinated. I like to lift my face towards gently falling rain and feel its cool prickle on my skin. I cannot stop marvelling at nature’s ingenuity in releasing water not in great sheets but as small and gentle drops.

Beautiful to the sight too are pendant drops that are left in the aftermath of rain. They hang from twigs and wires, tear-shaped and glistening in all the colours of the rainbow.

Water is not merely necessary for life, it is life. All the great civilisations of the world have grown around rivers.

Without water, all signs of life will fade away. Not a mystery this, considering that as much as 71 per cent of the human body consists of water!

But life-sustaining and life-nurturing as it is, we use water as if it can never run dry. Leaking taps, over usage and indiscriminate watering are all too common. Even those who spend hours at public taps collecting water have no qualms in wasting it wantonly when it is freely available.

One of the items in a magician’s repertoire is called “Water of Life”. You see a jug of water placed in one corner of the stage. From time to time, while engaged in another item, the magician takes a break and pours out water from it. You never see the water being replaced, but it comes out in a steady, inexhaustible stream. This of course is nothing more than an illusion, but in the world of real living we tend to treat water as if it possesses this magic property of lasting forever.

Will we see the truth before it is too late?