AND QUIET FLOWS THE KALI BEIN

The Kali Bein too used to be a river. Guru Nanak bathed in it everyday for 15 years until one day, having surfaced from the river; he felt a deep churning and disappeared into the forests for three days. When he returned, he was ready to lay the foundations of Sikhism. In that time, the Kali Bein was alive. Then one day, in dustrialisation killed it.

The holy river in Sultanpur Lodi, a little distance away from Jalandhar, went on a rapid degeneration spiral in the 1960s. The river battled effluents and garbage, it battled mankind’s disrespect and it battled the apathy of administration In the ’90s it lost the fight. By then, Nanak’s river had turned into a gutter no spirit, only squalor.

Those who had watched Kali Bein's miserable capitulation were either without care or hope except one man Balbir Singh Seechewal. A college dropout, Seechewal had already given up the material world for “environmental spiritualism” and was known in the region as ‘Rodda wala Baba’ (Saint of the Roads) for his missionary zeal to make pathways and connect people When he heard of the river’s plight, he volunteered to battle on its behalf.


“I vowed to make it alive again, to clean it and get back its dignity” Seechewal said, his silverblack beard waving gently in the cold winter wind. His followers and there are hordes in Punjab and the world over now recall how the impossible started. “One day, as officials were deliberating how to go about cleaning the river, Baba leaped into it,” says Balwinder, a long-time loyalist, as he fusses over Seechewal at his Nirmal Kuteya ashram, Sultanpur Lodi. What happened after that is now part of folklore.

As time passed and Seechewal would not temper his manic obsession, people around, touched by this lone man’s endeavor, joined in, first in trickles and then in huge waves. Work started in earnest on July 29, 2000.

Three years after that, when the Baba announced that cleaning would now go into its second phase – covering the next stretch till Dhanoa, the river’s starting point – thousands lined up to help. The Saint of the Roads had made environmental activism trendy. Everyone wanted to be seen cleaning the Kali Bein. Boys would tell their girlfriends, “You know, I cleaned the Bein last weekend.”

By the beginning of 2006, the project had seen unimaginable success. The kar seva that’s what people called the mission entered a new phase, with 35 kms of the river being turned inside out, its bed deepened. On April last year, President APJ Kalam visited Seechewal in his sanctuary. Seeing a dead river brimming with life, he went back 2000 years and compared the Baba to Maharishi Patanjali.

The old of Sultanpur Lodi sense the transformation. The perennial problem of river water pollution is no more and sewer water has been treated enough for irrigation. There are prettily cobbled riverbanks and carefully manicured gardens. It’s a new avatar for the town. “Pawan (wind) is our guru, paani (water) is our father and dharti (earth) our mother,” says the man behind the revolution. All things are connected, he adds. And as he invites his visitors to the langar (free meal), a sparkling black Mercedes stops by and a little girl gets down with her parents. “She’s heard how the Kali Bein is a clean river now. She wished to meet you, Baba ji,” says the mother. “Yes,” the girl speaks out excitedly. “Is there another river to clean?”