kāverī śloka - sahyādrijā mahāpuṇyā

Two lines on the Kaveri, and they are a geographical description before they are a prayer. She is born of the Sahya range, greatly holy, a great river called Kaveri; she is said to have twenty-seven mouths, and she gives everything that is wished for. Then the claim the verse exists to make, and it is about the banks rather than the water: her shores give heaven, and they give the state of Brahma and the state of Vishnu. That is the theology of the whole Kaveri delta in one half-line, since it is the towns along those banks — the shrines strung down both sides between the hills and the sea — and not the river alone that the sentence is really about.