Valluvar has just finished praising God — or nature, or the first principle, depending on whose commentary you trust. Now he does something that should stop you cold: the second thing he praises is rain. Not the soul. Not scripture. Not the teacher, the king, the sage, or the saint. Rain. Water falling from the sky. He gives it ten couplets — the same number he gave the divine — and by the end, rain has swallowed every category of human striving. Agriculture, worship, charity, penance, moral conduct: all of them are revealed as subsidiaries of a single atmospheric event. The argument is not sentimental. It is hydraulic. Valluvar is building a hierarchy of dependencies, and he wants you to understand that before you can discuss virtue, governance, or love, you must reckon with the fact that none of them survive a failed monsoon.