Man Is The Only Natural Disaster
- Madhukar Dama
- Aug 22
- 16 min read
Prologue
Earth has always known disasters — earthquakes, floods, storms, fires. Each comes, causes destruction, and then leaves space for life to begin again. Nature’s calamities have never been permanent; forests grow back, rivers find their course, animals return to balance.
But one disaster does not pass. It spreads, multiplies, and consumes everything in its path. This disaster has no season, no limit, no mercy. It is not lightning from the sky, nor tremors from below. It walks on two legs, speaks in many tongues, and builds while it destroys.
That disaster is man.
Unlike any other force of nature, man does not allow the Earth to heal. He digs without pause, burns without thought, kills without need. He calls himself creator, saviour, enlightened — yet everywhere he goes, forests fall, rivers choke, animals vanish, and air turns poisonous.
To call man a “natural disaster” is not poetry. It is a plain fact. Earthquakes shake and stop. Cyclones rage and fade. But man’s destruction is endless, deliberate, and global. Until we see ourselves for what we truly are — the only disaster born of nature — there can be no recovery, no balance, no future.
This is not accusation. It is recognition.
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1) Land — from fertile to barren
Punjab’s Green Revolution fields once fed the nation. Today the same soil is poisoned with chemicals, and cancer trains leave Bathinda for Bikaner.
In Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh, tribal farmland is blasted for coal, bauxite, and iron ore. Villages vanish.
Bengaluru buried its lakes under apartments and IT parks. Now one heavy rain drowns the city. This is not nature’s flood. This is man’s real estate flood.
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2) Water — from sacred to sewage
Yamuna once worshipped, now froths like a detergent tank. Ganga has crores spent on cleaning, yet still chokes on plastic and sewage.
In Gujarat and Rajasthan, borewells go 1000 feet deep. Farmers steal tomorrow’s water for today’s crop.
Chennai filled Pallikaranai marsh with towers. When rain comes, homes flood. Marsh was the sponge. Man turned it into a mall.
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3) Air — from life breath to poison
Delhi’s air chokes children before they reach old age. Kanpur, Lucknow, Patna—every winter, smog sits like death.
Raigarh in Chhattisgarh breathes sponge iron dust 24/7.
Crores of vehicles jammed on Indian roads burn fuel not for need but for status.
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4) Forests — from shelter to stumps
Aravallis and Western Ghats are cut for mines and highways.
Elephants in Kerala walk into towns, because their forest is now rubber plantation. Leopards in Gurugram are not lost; they are refugees.
Tribals who protected forests for centuries are thrown out as “encroachers.”
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5) Mountains — from stability to landslides
Himalayas blasted for Char Dham highways, tunnels, and dams. Joshimath cracked, Shimla slides, Kedarnath drowned.
In Meghalaya, children die in rat-hole coal mines.
Manali, Leh, Ooty—mountains suffocate under hotels, cars, and plastic.
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6) Oceans and Coasts — from rhythm to ruin
Odisha and Kerala lose whole villages to sea erosion. Ports and seawalls disturb the currents.
Ennore creek in Chennai is black with fly ash; Vizag waters stink of oil.
Trawlers scrape seabeds, killing young fish. Traditional fishermen return empty-handed.
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7) Cities — from shelter to trap
Luxury towers stand on filled lakes, while slums grow beside them.
Heat islands form in Delhi and Hyderabad where trees were cut for cement.
Ghazipur garbage mountain in Delhi is taller than Qutub Minar.
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8) Food — from nourishment to poison
Vegetables sprayed with pesticides, milk mixed with detergent, honey with sugar syrup.
Fast food chains spread diabetes in every town.
Traditional foods like ambali, millet, and fermented curd vanish. Chips and colas replace them.
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9) Health — from balance to breakdown
Diabetes, BP, cancer—once rare, now everyday diseases.
Social media addiction, stress, and depression make young people sick in the mind.
Pharma sells endless pills for symptoms, not cures.
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10) Society — from community to chaos
Status is car, phone, mall, not wisdom or kindness.
“Use and throw” culture destroys both nature and human bonds.
A billionaire’s skyscraper rises in Mumbai while children beg at the gate.
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11) Culture — from wisdom to distraction
Ayurveda, Siddha, and tribal healing are mocked, while chemical pills are worshipped.
Diwali means firecrackers, not light. Ganesh visarjan means plaster idols choking rivers.
Schools teach coding, not nature. Children can read PUBG maps but not village maps.
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12) Mind — from silence to noise
People stare at screens, not stars.
Apps sell dopamine, corporates profit from emptiness.
Temples become malls, gurus become brands.
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13) Soil life — killed from below
Earthworms, fungi, microbes—the real farmers—are dying under chemical overload. Dead soil can’t hold water, so both floods and droughts worsen.
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14) Seeds — stolen and standardized
Native seeds that survived centuries are replaced by patented hybrids. Farmers must buy every season. Diversity goes, risk grows.
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15) Springs and stepwells — forgotten veins
Himalayan springs and village baolis once gave water all year. Now they are dried or ignored. Tankers fill the gap.
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16) Mangroves — natural shields cut down
Sundarbans and Mumbai’s mangroves once protected against storms. We cleared them for ports and towers. Now cyclones strike harder.
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17) Coral reefs — quietly destroyed
Lakshadweep reefs die from dredging and warming seas. Fish vanish. Islanders lose food.
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18) Grasslands — wrongly called wastelands
Banni, Tal Chhapar, Rollapadu—true homes of wolves and bustards—are converted into factories and farms. Pastoralists lose their land.
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19) Wetlands — blocked and buried
East Kolkata Wetlands and Bengaluru lakes once filtered water and waste. We blocked them. Now floods and toxic foams are routine.
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20) Glaciers — destabilized
Roads and dams cut Himalayan ice zones. Glacial floods and landslides follow. Pilgrim highways became disaster corridors.
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21) Monsoon — disturbed by man
Forests cut, soil paved, cities heated. Rainfall patterns break down. Droughts and floods alternate unnaturally.
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22) Desertification — creeping slowly
Bundelkhand, Marathwada—fields overgrazed, borewells sucked dry. Topsoil flies in the wind. Desert spreads.
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23) Pollinators — starved
Bees and butterflies lose flowers to monoculture and pesticides. Fruit sets fall. No pollinators, no harvest.
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24) Vultures — almost wiped out
A single cattle drug killed almost all vultures. Carcasses rot; stray dogs rise; rabies spreads.
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25) Night sky — stolen
LED glare hides stars. Birds lose direction, insects die, humans can’t sleep well.
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26) Noise — constant assault
Honking, loudspeakers, drilling. Fish and dolphins disturbed by ship noise. Nature loses silence.
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27) Sand mining — rivers collapse
Illegal dredging weakens bridges, erodes banks, kills fish. Mafia profits, rivers die.
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28) Dams — repeated wounds
Big dams displaced millions and trapped silt. Downstream farmers lost fertile soil.
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29) Seas — overfished
Trawlers catch young fish and scrape corals. Small fishers return empty.
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30) Meat and dairy industry — new poison
Factory farms pump antibiotics and hormones. Superbugs grow. Waste flows into rivers.
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31) Stray conflict — created by us
We dumped waste, starved forests, and now blame cows and leopards for entering cities.
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32) Roadkill — highways kill silently
From snakes to elephants, highways cut migration routes. Minutes saved, lives lost.
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33) Quarries — land gutted
Stone, brick, limestone—hills destroyed, dust diseases spread.
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34) Fly ash — villages buried
Coal plants dump toxic ash on fields and rivers. “Cheap power” is paid by poor lungs.
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35) E-waste — acid on children’s hands
Children in Moradabad strip wires with acid to recover copper. Phones in cities become poison in villages.
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36) Medical waste — dumped openly
Masks, syringes, hospital trash burned in open air. Neighbours breathe disease.
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37) Poisoned wells — arsenic and fluoride
Bengal, Bihar, Assam drink arsenic. Rajasthan drinks fluoride. People rot slowly inside.
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38) Commons — stolen
Village ponds, grazing lands, sacred groves—fenced, sold, and gone. Women walk farther for wood and water.
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39) Streets — stolen from people
Cars and parking take over. Pedestrians, cyclists, children are pushed aside.
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40) Migrant workers — used and thrown
They built towers and metros, then walked home hungry during lockdown. Invisible in policy.
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41) Attention — mined like coal
Apps steal our time. Children lose childhood to reels and games.
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42) Languages — erased
Mother tongues vanish in schools. With them, weather lore, songs, and seeds vanish too.
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43) Crafts — undercut
Handlooms and artisans crushed by cheap imports. Culture fades, plastic rises.
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44) Schools — marks without life
Children cram for ranks, not rains. No gardening, cooking, or survival skills.
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45) Elders — parked away
Joint families broken. Elders sit lonely with TV and pills.
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46) Families — fractured by migration
Villages empty, slums swell, festivals become video calls.
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47) Rules — captured
Polluters sit on panels. Clearances come before studies. Victims must prove harm.
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48) Data — harvested
Maps, habits, faces sold for profit. Our minds mined like minerals.
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49) Debt — new slavery
Farmers borrow for seeds, then for survival. Urban families drown in EMIs.
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50) Religion — market show
Mega temples with food courts, plaster idols in rivers, VIP darshan for money.
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51) Playgrounds — paved
School grounds sold, parks turned into event venues. Children grow indoors.
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52) Tourism — suffocating love
Hill towns drown in cars, beaches in plastic, villages in homestays.
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53) Disaster response — photo-op
Relief comes with cameras. Prevention never comes.
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54) Laws — paper tigers
Wetlands protected on paper, destroyed in practice.
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55) Gated living — walls of fear
Apartments guard themselves while lakes and streets outside rot.
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56) Heat spiral — AC as cure and curse
We cut trees, then cool with ACs that heat cities further.
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57) Energy greed — greenwashed
Solar and wind parks crush grasslands and displace people when badly planned.
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58) Greenwash — carbon credits
Offsets plant trees on grazing land. Reports shine, rivers stink.
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59) Science — without humility
Drug trials and GM crops tested on the poor, benefits kept in boardrooms.
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60) Plastic flood — from plate to body
Plastic sachets and bottles now found in fish, salt, milk, even human blood.
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61) Faith — ritual without responsibility
We worship rivers with lamps, then dump waste behind the temple.
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62) Forest fires — season of smoke
Power lines and encroachment turn summers into ash.
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63) Theft from the future — unborn must pay
Every shortcut bill is pushed forward: to children’s lungs, dried wells, missing fish, and lost culture.
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Conclusion
Floods, droughts, landslides, famines, cancer, suicides, smog, plastic, poisoned food—these are not “acts of God.” They are acts of man. Bulldozers, borewells, pesticides, coal plants, highways, and smartphones are the new cyclones.
Nature is not the disaster. Man is.
And unless man remembers he is part of nature—not its master—he will destroy not just rivers, forests, and mountains, but himself.
MAN IS THE ONLY NATURAL DISASTER
-- a dialogue with Madhukar
Setting: A small courtyard outside a village community hall. Five people from different walks of life have come because they heard about the exposé. They believe man is the master of nature — saviour, enlightened, superior. Madhukar sits with them, quiet, ready to listen.
Characters:
Madhukar — calm, plain-speaking.
Rajiv — real estate developer. Confident, loud.
Sunita — local politician. Practical, proud of projects.
Arjun — tech entrepreneur. Loves data and apps.
Meera — young influencer. Loves progress and city life.
Ramanna — farmer. Silent at first, watches.
---
Rajiv: (smiling) We built the new mall on the lake edge. Everyone has jobs now. What’s wrong with that? Man tames nature. That’s progress.
Sunita: We paved the road, brought electricity, piped water. Before us the village had no shops. People vote for change. We’re saviours.
Arjun: My app tells farmers when to sell. My sensors save water. Technology is the cure. Nature is a problem to be managed.
Meera: People who preach caution sound like fear. We are enlightened. We can fix anything with money and clever ideas.
Madhukar: (nods) Good. Tell me one clear thing: what do you mean when you say “tame” or “fix”?
Rajiv: Make land useful. Convert unused land to income. Build, develop, move forward.
Arjun: Remove uncertainty. Use data to predict and control outcomes. If something floods, we send resources faster.
Madhukar: (soft) I hear you. Now tell me honestly — who cleans the river when a chemical plant spills? Who rebuilds when a new road causes a landslide? Who pays when a borewell goes dry?
Sunita: The company compensates, sometimes. Government helps with relief.
Meera: Insurance covers some. And we Tweet. Public pressure sorts most things out.
Ramanna: (quietly) Your “most things” are not the farmer’s things. When the well dries, tweeting does not bring water.
Arjun: But tech can map wells. We can plan.
Madhukar: Let me try a picture. Imagine a house. Inside, one man lights a fire to keep warm. He burns the furniture. He burns the curtains, the table, the floor. The house becomes warm for a while. He calls himself clever — he has heat. But soon the smoke fills the room, beams weaken, roof starts sagging. The fire that gave warmth now makes the house collapse. Who was the disaster?
Rajiv: The man — but that’s silly. He had to warm himself.
Madhukar: Exactly. At first, there is a useful tool — fire. But when the tool is used in a way that destroys the very shelter that holds life, the user becomes the disaster. Not because he’s evil, but because his actions removed the house’s ability to protect itself.
Sunita: So you say we shouldn’t build? No roads? No hospitals?
Madhukar: No. I say we must not confuse building with taking away the house. You built a road through a gentle slope because it was the cheapest path. The slope slid in the first heavy rain. You called it bad luck. Who designed that cost-cutting? Who rewarded you for speed? The disaster came from a choice built into the system — incentives and blind spots — not from the rain alone.
Meera: But development brings jobs. Without it, people stay poor.
Madhukar: True. Development can bring good. The question is: at what hidden price? When a new job comes from filling a wetland, the job is real — but the wetland was doing another job that nobody paid for: holding floodwater, keeping fish, feeding a village. When we turn that function into a profit for a few, the cost moves elsewhere. The cost becomes someone else’s flood, someone else’s lost harvest.
Arjun: That’s what economists call externalities. We can price them in.
Madhukar: Can you? You put a price tag on a grandmother’s well, on children who breathe dirty air, on a coastline that no longer protects a fishing village. The market can measure some things, but it misses the slow harm that shows decades later and the lives that never had a voice.
Ramanna: (slow) We plant a tree, but a company plants a hundred saplings in a field and calls itself green. Our river dries, they plant numbers on paper. Who eats the fish?
Rajiv: (a bit irritated) This sounds like blaming progress. We feed cities, build hospitals. You ignore the lives we lift.
Madhukar: I am not saying stop lifting lives. I am saying do not lift with one hand while crushing with the other. Think of man as both doctor and disease. The scalpel can remove a tumor — or it can be used carelessly and cut the heart. The problem is not tools; it is the way we set the goals, the short time frame, and who wins immediately.
Sunita: (defensive) Politics needs visible wins. People want a road next year, not a saved marsh they may never see.
Madhukar: And that is the heart of the disaster. Systems that reward what is visible and immediate push people to act in ways that harm long-term health. You become a short-term machine. If votes, profits, or clicks are paid now, nobody pays for the slow damage. That damage piles up until a monsoon, a cold snap, or a price shock turns the built system into a disaster.
Arjun: Are you saying the fault is the incentive? Change incentives — carbon tax, fines, rewards. Tech can enforce that.
Madhukar: Yes, changing incentives matters. But there is deeper. Even with correct incentives, if we place everything in one basket — one river dam for one big city, one crop for the whole region, one codebase for everyone’s life — failure becomes catastrophic. Concentration makes a small mistake huge. Diversity and redundancy — many small dishes rather than one banquet — prevent total collapse.
Meera: So you want small farms, no big farms? Small clinics, no hospitals?
Madhukar: Not at all. We want balance. Imagine a village with a big hospital and many small clinics. If the power fails in the big hospital, small clinics and local knowledge help. If the big hospital is the only source and it fails, the whole village is helpless. Centralizing everything puts all eggs in one fragile basket. Centralization plus greed equals scale of disaster.
Rajiv: You keep saying “man is disaster.” That sounds like you hate humans.
Madhukar: I do not hate humans. I love them. I also speak plainly: when our systems — the laws, markets, plans, engineers, and habits — treat the living world as a set of inputs to extract, then the result is the human-made disaster. The person who dug a well, drained a pond, or cleared a forest might not be cruel; often he is following rules that reward him. But the system created him and the outcome. So we must change the system.
Ramanna: (finally) You say system. But who changes the system? We did vote. We sent people to office.
Madhukar: You did. But the people in power often earn by repeating the pattern. They are rewarded for speed and pieces of paper that show growth. The tea stalls, the construction yards, the contractors — they all form a network. To change the system, we must change the network — laws, who sits on boards, what counts as success, and who bears the cost when something breaks.
Arjun: That sounds huge. Hard to do.
Madhukar: It is hard. But start small. Protect what works like a wetland or an old seed bank. Make a rule: every new project must demonstrate where the lost function will be restored, not just claimed in PR. Price the things markets miss — the air children breathe, the night sky their grandchildren will never see. Make local voices part of decisions. Teach young engineers to ask “what stops this from breaking?” before “how fast can we build?”
Sunita: (softening) So we keep building, but we don’t break the house to get wood for the fire.
Madhukar: Exactly. Man is not the enemy when he remembers he is part of the house. Man becomes the disaster when he believes he is outside the house — master of the roof, not caring that the roof falls on him too.
Meera: (quiet) I always thought progress was proof of being better. Now I see progress can hide a slow harm.
Rajiv: (looks at his hands) We are praised for turning land to profit. But if the profit leaves the place poorer in safety and life, can we still be proud?
Ramanna: (nods) I see it. When the river came and took our fields, they said it was storm. I thought God was angry. Now I think it was the road they built, the trees they cut. The storm found the weak part.
Madhukar: That is the shift. It is not just facts. It is a change in who we hold responsible and how we design our work. If you start calling man-made harm what it is — human disaster — you stop raising funds to “repair” and start stopping the harm in the first place.
Arjun: So the real work is slow — changing how we design, who decides, how we count success.
Madhukar: Slow, but honest. And in that honesty there is real power. You will still build. You will still create. But you will add the habit of asking, “Does this make the house weaker for me or my neighbour?” If the answer is yes, you do not build that way.
Sunita: (turns to the group) We can promise roads that keep hills safe. We can keep a lake when we build. We can demand that companies pay for what they break.
Meera: I can speak about it to my followers. Not as doom, but as common sense.
Rajiv: And I will try to show a different model to my partners. Maybe slower, maybe a little less profit now—but less collapse later.
Ramanna: (smiles) If the well keeps water, I will be the happiest. I do not want your tweets. I want water.
Madhukar: (smiles) That is enough for a start. Remember: man is not only a maker; he is the only agent that can create these slow, repeated disasters. That means he is also the only one who can stop them. The question is whether we want to be repairers who build to last, or builders who leave ashes for the next season.
(They sit quiet for a moment. The sun lowers. The courtyard is calm. The conversation has changed from argument to a slow agreement — not perfect, not solved, but shifted.)
— END —
Man: The Only Natural Disaster
the earth was fine
before we arrived.
rivers ran their course.
mountains stood still.
forests burned, healed, grew back.
animals killed to eat,
died to feed.
no waste.
no excess.
no guilt.
then came man.
the clever monkey
who thought he was god,
who thought he was saviour,
who thought he was enlightened.
he cut the tree,
then preached about forests.
he killed the cow,
then built temples for it.
he drained rivers,
then wrote poems on water scarcity.
he dug the earth for coal,
then cried about climate change.
man calls earthquakes disasters.
man calls cyclones disasters.
but these are just earth’s moods.
they come, they go,
they don’t leave the world crippled.
the only disaster
that never stops
is man.
---
he poisons food with chemicals,
calls it progress.
he sells medicine for side effects
caused by the last medicine.
he builds cities on farmland,
then imports rice.
he teaches children alphabets,
but not how to breathe clean air.
he kills tigers,
then opens sanctuaries.
he drowns villages for dams,
then builds statues of leaders
to praise his “vision.”
he wipes out languages,
then boasts about “global unity.”
he locks up old people in homes,
then celebrates “family values.”
he floods the internet with garbage,
then complains about attention span.
---
everywhere he goes,
destruction follows.
the forest dies,
the soil cracks,
the ocean chokes,
the sky suffocates.
and man smiles
in his white coat,
his black suit,
his saffron robe,
his khaki uniform,
his filthy pride.
he believes he is chosen.
he believes without him,
the world will collapse.
but the truth is brutal:
without him,
the world will heal.
---
man says:
“we are superior.
we invented medicine,
machines,
democracy,
religion,
art,
science.”
but all of it
was just another way
to hide his destruction.
medicine made him weaker.
machines made him lazier.
democracy made him corrupt.
religion made him cruel.
art made him arrogant.
science made him blind.
---
the tiger kills
to feed its stomach.
the lion kills
to protect its pride.
the earthquake shakes,
the volcano erupts,
the cyclone spins.
but man kills
for profit,
for politics,
for fun.
that is the difference.
that is why man
is the only natural disaster.
---
look at India.
plastic choking rivers,
concrete swallowing farmland,
flyovers crushing villages.
farmers dying,
tribals displaced,
children growing up
on chips and cola.
Bollywood sells sex and violence,
politicians sell lies,
godmen sell fear,
corporates sell poison.
and the middle class—
the great educated middle class—
buys it all
and still believes
it is innocent.
---
the disaster is not far away.
it is inside your kitchen,
your school,
your hospital,
your mobile screen.
every meal,
every scroll,
every purchase
is another bomb
you drop on the earth.
---
one day,
the rivers will dry.
the soil will refuse grain.
the air will burn lungs.
the oceans will rise
and eat back the coasts.
but don’t call it “nature’s revenge.”
nature never revenges.
it only resets.
the real revenge
is man
against himself.
---
you think you are saviour?
look around.
you are the disease,
the cancer,
the endless fire.
and when you are gone,
trees will grow again,
rivers will flow clean,
the air will soften,
the animals will roam free.
earth will finally breathe,
because the only natural disaster
will have ended.
