By Dr. Ashraf Zainabi

A stream does not forget where it once ran. 

Long before a road was laid over it, and a shop opened on its old bank, the ground still holds the memory of that channel, the slight dip, the softer soil, and the place where rain used to gather and move on. 

Then a storm comes, heavier than the ones the calendar had prepared for, and the water goes looking for its old bed. 

Sometimes it finds a living room instead.

This is the pattern that repeats from the Himalayan foothills to the American West, and it is worth stating plainly at the outset: heavy rainfall is not the disaster. 

The disaster is what we built in its path. 

A torrent moving through an empty gully is a hydrological event. The same torrent moving through a crowded settlement becomes a catastrophe, and the difference has less to do with the water than with what stood in front of it.

Floodplains, wetlands, seasonal streams and mountain gullies form a landscape’s own drainage system, built........

© Kashmir Observer