Madurai is a city celebrated for its temples and poets. The poets in Madurai quite often pen poems about cities and temples. Their poems narrate how every summer a river flowing through Madurai reduced itself to a narrow stream, and how later it got flooded with rain waters. While the river is reduced to a narrow stream, its water cannot pass through the Watergate as the debris of straw and women’s hair obstruct the flow. The bridge over this river appears like a puzzle of repaired patches. The stones of the bridges glisten once again with the onset of rain, and the dull ones retain their original hue.

The poets limit the subject of their writings to floods in the rivers .What Ramanujan implies is that poets only idealize or commercialize the situation, and nothing is done practically to prevent or reduce the damage done by the devastation. A visitor to Madurai gets to hear of the impact of the flood-how the flood waters religiously washed away three village homes, one pregnant woman and several cows every year. As an imminent flood lurked over the people’s minds they constantly talked about the rising water-levels.

The poets objectively cited the lines composed by previous poets; little did they care for the pregnant woman drowned in the flood.…