The verse uses an extreme heat/desert image to speak about a condition of inner dryness and burning. On one level it resembles a physical scene: walking in a scorching pālai so the soles blister, the body grows faint, and thirst dominates awareness. Siddhar speech often turns such bodily pictures into a map of the psycho-spiritual body: “adi” can point to the literal feet and also the “root/base” (one’s foundation, stability, or the lower center), while “mudi” can be hair and also the “crown/top” (the head, the peak of embodied experience, even the sense of ‘I’). “Melting” from base to crown suggests a loss of steadiness under an excess of heat—whether the heat of passion, the heat of tapas/practice, or a pathological “pitta-like” burning.

“Thirst” (தாகம், akin to tr̥ṣṇā) is not merely dehydration; it is craving itself. The line “mōkam uṟum tāgam” can be read as: thirst gives rise to moha, and/or thirst itself becomes moha—craving turns into delusion, obsession, and compulsive pursuit. In Siddhar ethics and yoga, this describes how unregulated desire dries the mind, weakens discrimination, and makes the whole body-mind system ‘intoxicated’ (மப்பளம்: dazed, stupefied, fogged). The teaching is not simply moralistic; it is also diagnostic: when craving-heat dominates, symptoms appear from the “feet” upward—eruptions, agitation, faintness, and loss of clarity—signaling imbalance that must be cooled and stabilized (through restraint, right diet/medicine, breath regulation, and inner stillness), rather than fed by further pursuit.