When Water Claims Its Rightful Way

Dr Umer Iqbal
The internet hums back to life, yet floodwaters still refuse to retreat from people’s homes. Screens glow again, but living rooms remain submerged. It is a reminder, stark and wet, that while wires can be repaired in hours, wounds inflicted upon nature linger for years.
We lived through the 2014 floods. We vowed lessons would be learned. We spoke of planning, of restraint, of respect for the rivers. And yet, a decade later, the same script plays again. Mining has chewed through mountains, dredging has unsettled riverbeds, and construction has choked floodplains. When nature is pushed against the wall, it doesn’t negotiate, it reclaims.
Who came first? The river or the house that now stands upon its bank? Who trespassed into whose territory? When the water simply follows its age-old course, is it a calamity, or a correction?
The tragedy is not that rivers overflow. The tragedy is that we, with hubris and haste, believed we could redraw their boundaries with cement and greed. And now, as water flows through bedrooms and kitchens, we raise an uproar, forgetting it is we who moved into the river’s jurisdiction first.
Floods, then, are not merely acts of nature. They are reminders; blunt, merciless, and costly, that nature has the first right of way.
The choice before us is stark. Continue fiddling with nature until disaster becomes routine, or step back and give the river its rightful space. The river is not the trespasser. We are. And when the river comes knocking on our doors, it is not an act of invasion, it is an act of remembrance.
Nature always remembers. It is we who forget.
The author can be reached at: editor@straight-talk-communications.com