“Birth, sickness, aging and death flow ever onward, a river without ford or bridge… Have you prepared yourself a boat?”– Dampa Sangye, 12th-century Tibetan monk.Who owns the Himalayas? Pilgrims, traders, scientists and climbers may have crossed the boundaries without any consciousness of crossing sovereign boundaries between nations, but boundaries do exist. The Himalayas, Hindukush, Karakoram, Pamirs, Tien Shan and Kun Lun are a vast and complex area more than half the size of Europe. The mountain clusters may appear to be a conjoined whole, but they are located within national boundaries of India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and China-occupied Tibet and China.A century ago, this area in Asia was mostly treated like a mysterious and formidable bastion of the unknown. Nepal was dubbed the ‘land of mystery’, Lhasa was ‘the forbidden city’ and the Pamirs were ‘the Third Pole’. In 1960, B.P. Koirala claimed the entire Everest mountain to be the property of Nepal, but Mao archly pointed out that Nepal did not even have an indigenous name for it. In 2026, life on the roof of the world is mired in political intrigue and human excreta, both real and metaphorical. China has demarcated its boundaries defiantly, and Chinese troops have dismantled the ancient monasteries. Soviet engineers planned to alter the course of rivers flowing through Central Asia. India and Pakistan have repeatedly clashed over their share of river waters and threats to their national boundaries.“We have seen more changes,” my father-in-law told me once, “than our ancestors had seen in the last 1,000 years.” He would know. As a senior ICS officer, he had served both under the British and Indian governments and watched historic changes unfurl from a ringside seat as India’s Cabinet Secretary. After he retired in the 1980s, instead of building a large, sprawling mansion in the plains, he had chosen to retire to his humble ancestral home in Almora. There he spent nearly four decades studying the area, its human population and its network of rivers and intermarried families. From him, I learnt the more we think on the area in political terms, the less we see what actually threatens the multiple socio-political histories it hides within. With New Delhi and its representatives treating this remote but fiercely different geography, and those who inhabit it, as just another state of India, vast environmental and political degradation has followed. The centralised vision of development of Dev Bhumi is informed not by reverence, but simple human greed.A crass example of the above was a two-day Devbhumi cultural festival held in Chamoli district on September 18 and 19 at the Tourist Arrival Plaza at one of the holiest ancient shrines in north India, the Badrinath Dham. It was a loud, crass event, replete with loud music and DJs and pop singers, with young crowds from the plains dancing all night long to music. This is traditionally an area where even blowing of a conch shell is forbidden, given its acute sensitivity to loud acoustics triggering off landslides.As the videos went viral on social media, all hell broke loose. The Chamoli administration quickly distanced itself from the event and blamed the army for organising it. Based on earlier correspondence between the district administration and the army released to the media, it appears that it was a coordinated event, planned by all stakeholders.All this happened in the midst of one of the most devastating chains of glacial lake collapses, with water and rocks hurtling down among mountains and washing away vast numbers of buildings, humans and public properties in neighbouring Nepal and Tibet. Today, with northern Bihar reeling under the gushing river waters from across the mountains and major landslides reported from Sikkim, Uttarakhand and Himachal due to seismic energy released by the natural calamity up in Tibet, no Himalayan state feels safe. And make no mistake. The wells drying up in Vidarbha, the trees being felled in Shivaliks (despite loud and long protests from the locals and environmentalists), the flooding of Rishikesh and Chhapra are all linked to the same environmental bell that is tolling for all of us.The Himalayas are the world’s youngest mountains, born only three or four million years ago, the blink of an eye for geologists. Their birth shaped their peculiar formation, led to increased rainfall on the southern side, which were soon rich with a variety of flora and fauna. India today was a mass come floating through the now-gone sea of Tethys, a gigantic mass of hard volcanic rocks, granite and basalt that went on to form the unyielding landscape of Deccan Plateau. The Himalayan region, however, is a mix of what lay at the underbelly of Asia: sandstone, limestone, coral and clay. As Himalayas arose, squeezing all this material upwards and ever upwards like toothpaste squeezed from a tube, a process that is still going on, their core remains relatively soft and vulnerable. This is why Joshimath, built on the bed of a lost glacier, is sinking today just as he had predicted.Joshimath town. Photo: Vaibhav78545/Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 4.0“Nadi apna bagad nahin chhodti”, a river never lets go of its area, is a common wisdom among the villagers. Like the Himalayas, our mountainous rivers are also an anachronism. They are older than the Himalayas and have been flowing southwards from their sources located in the Tibetan zone since the Cretaceous era. They have refused to be held back by the mountains. Instead, they have cut deep gorges to continue along their usual pathways. So the watershed of the Himalayas is not among the peaks but some 100 miles north and 10,000 feet lower in the Tibetan plateau. When a lake behind the Badrinath suddenly burst its shores and released flood waters that swept off entire villages along the Mandakini river bed, the shaken villagers’ reaction was, “the river has reclaimed what was hers.” The British, when they were navigating and assessing the area for building roads, had consulted the village elders and carefully planted stone markers to mark out the river bed. They came out after the villages and hotels and spas were washed away, as proof of human folly.Today, the veil of romance spun by western trekkers and map makers has been shredded. And we can see the vulnerability that lies beneath the obvious beauty of the Himalayas. Given today’s politically volatile atmosphere and constant bickering and armed clashes, it is a matter of utmost urgency that if they wish to survive and keep their waters and forests intact, all stakeholders must cooperate or they will all wither and die separately. None of the countries by themselves must build dams to corner vast amounts of water to build and generate power. None must unilaterally open new trekking routes for rich adventurers or allow tour operators to declare some areas as abode of gods. It has the effect of holding back poor pilgrims and ushering in hordes of merry-makers who come here to eat, drink and make reels, leaving mountains of shit and trash behind.Saakhi is a Sunday column from Mrinal Pande, in which she writes of what she sees and also participates in. That has been her burden to bear ever since she embarked on a life as a journalist, writer, editor, author and as chairperson of Prasar Bharti. Her journey of being a witness-participant continues.