My thoughts dwelt on Agni this week, as I walked out of the house every day and saw a sky of grey. The haze is due to the primitive method of land clearing by fire in Indonesia. Now Agni is identified in Hinduism with the sacrificial fire and seen as the mediator carrying the offerings of men to gods. The very first hymn in the Rig Deva is addressed to him; in fact with 200 hymns addressed to him, he is the most important deity there next to Indra. There is a story in the Mahabharata about Agni devouring the Khandava forest with his flames and coming into conflict with Indra who is pouring rain; Agni then gets help from Arjuna and Krishna to fight Indra and soon regains his vigour by consuming the forest. Historians have speculated that Vedic hymns telling of Agni burning his way eastwards were probably a reflection of migrations by Indo-Aryan language speakers down the Ganga basin, burning and cutting down forests through the generations. It is not by pure coincidence that in Greek mythology there is also the figure of Prometheus, who stole fire from the heavens to give to mankind, incurring the anger of Zeus. The discovery of fire for cooking, lighting, etc marked the dawn of civilisation around the world. Incidentally fire is also a sacred symbol in Zoroastrianism, referred to in hymns as the son of supreme god Ahura Mazda; one may add here that the Zoroastrian sacred text of Avesta is written in Old Persian which has close affinity with Sanskrit, but let's not discuss the history or myth of 'Aryan' people now.

Talking about history, there have also been parallels drawn between the ten avatars of Vishnu and the evolution of nature and mankind. You can see Matsya as representing fish and other lifeforms in water, Kurma as representing amphibians, Varaha and Narasimha as life on land or mammals and so on, you can think of Parashurama with an axe as signalling early human development through invention of tools whereas Balarama with a plough symbolises development in agriculture, and of course for the most important avatars, Rama embodies social order or the ability to govern nations, while Krishna represents the delights in science and art. If you include Buddha, it's up to you to interpret, maybe he can be a symbol of philosophical reflections, or harmony with man and nature, but then again there are people who think he came just to confound.

There is a nice song Sri Satyanarayanam I was just listening to, by Muthuswami Dikshitar, it's in the haunting raga of Subha Pantuvarali. In the charanam it goes like "... Kaliyuka prasannam ... Matsya kurma varahati ...". I don't quite understand the words but it's like an earnest prayer to Vishnu the preserver, with emotions sounding like desperation to my ears. Sometimes I can't help feeling we are indeed living in the era of Kali Yuga, and the end of the world is coming soon, at least for human beings who have done everything other than helping to preserve nature. We have gone through all the evolution and all the agricultural and industrial revolutions, all the advancement of the intellect, only to help destroy mother earth and ultimately ourselves. Global temperature is rising and people are still denying anything has gone wrong or simply refusing to do anything about it. Call it human logic, which has value only in serving the beast of economic development.