Two members of Mahatma Gandhi’s inner circle, Swami Anand and Kaka Kalelkar, were both great prose stylists, great authorities on Indian culture and religions, and both smitten by the Himalayas. They made a pilgrimage of the ‘Char Dham’ together and returned to write travelogues – in each other’s mother tongues: Swami in Marathi, and Kalelkar in Gujarati. Both works are classics.

In his “Himalaya-no Pravas”, Kalelkar mentions an old tradition associated with Kedarnath. In old days, pilgrims used to carry a copy of their horoscopes along and after the darshan of the Shivalinga – actually a block of a triangular stone jutting out of earth – they would tear their horoscopes into pieces. Kalelkar offers two ways to make sense of this ritual. One, you have been, as it were, face-to-face with the great lord, and now no harm can come to you from those planets. Two, after this most arduous and greatest of the pilgrimages, your mission on earth is accomplished, for the religious-minded, the life is over.

Kedarnath thus is the place where life as we know it ends. A reminder of this belief stands right behind the austere, weather-beaten temple: the samadhi of Adi Shankaracharya. Legend has it that the great advait vedantist left his body, that is achieved, videha mukti, at this spot. Like the temple, the samadhi too has Spartan aesthetics; it has only a mace-bearing hand coming out of a wall.

During the past week, a heap of bodies were lying around the place where pilgrims in previous centuries used to symbolically end their lives, leaving torn horoscopes to the winds from the valley. The Shankaracharya samadhi has also bore the brunt of the flash floods and needs to be reconstructed, like the lives of the thousands of survivors.

How do we make sense of the tragedy, of lives lost? That is the question that every natural disaster leaves in its wake. It usually evokes two kinds of responses, religious and scientific, as illustrated by a famous debate. For the January 1934 earthquake in Bihar, Gandhi’s explanation was that it was a divine retribution of the barbaric practice of untouchability. Tagore had to counter him with scientific explanation: “physical catastrophes have their inevitable and exclusive origin in certain combination of physical facts”.

Both attitudes, religious and scientific, would however point to the same thing in the case of the latest tragedy: degradation and exploitation of the pristine environment of Uttarakhand. Gandhi would have seen the tragedy as a divine retribution for denuding the verdant hills and damming the holy rivers. Tagore’s rationalism too would have agreed.

Apart from the administrative factors including disaster preparedness, what needs to engage the national attention is ways to preserve and sustain this heritage of nature. Ignoring that call would be a, well, Himalayan blunder.