Turkey, Syria and the real threat beneath India's feet

A razor's edge separates life from death. The Kathopanishad, a conversation between Nachiketa and A Yama, the god of death, uses the Sanskrit phrase for that edge - kshurasya dhara. This edge has a seismic equivalent in the fault lines between the 15 log-jammed tectonic plates on which the Earth's crust sits.

These lines can sleep for decades, centuries even, so quietly that their existence is forgotten by those who are not geologists or seismologists. Which is a huge majority of us. Until they stir and shake, and then mutilate, destroy and kill whatever lies on and along those lines, those razor edges.

No one knows this edge, this dhara today better than the millions of Turkish and Syrian survivors of the earthquakes that devastated those two countries on February 6.

With 40,000-odd people dead and the numbers mounting, their people felt the razor's edges come murderously alive that day. They were asleep when the first quaking happened after 4am at 7.8 on the seismic scale of 0 to 10. A second, measuring 6.7 followed 11 minutes later. The third came like an accomplice of the first, nine hours later, decimating whatever lay on or around those fault lines, those razor's edges.

These tectonic plates and the fault lines at their intersections keep moving, ever so silently, even as they sleep, exactly as human tissues keep growing even as we slumber.