Nepal didn’t just drown – it was drowned. Why are we all pretending otherwise?
By now we’ve all seen the visuals. Collapsed highways, submerged residences, hundreds of lives gone.
And already, the story is being packaged for us: “natural disaster,” “act of God,” a failure of early warning sensors. Anything and everything, except the ‘C-word,’ which nobody dares to bring up in all the vibrant rhetoric and discourse.
Here’s why we’re staying silent, and what we need to face before it’s too late.
Long story short: We avoid the word “climate” because bringing it up means admitting guilt.
Most of us think of ourselves as decent people – good citizens, good parents, good neighbors. Nobody would ever want to imagine themselves as complicit in hundreds of deaths.
But the emissions behind this disaster didn’t come from nowhere, did they? They came from daily habits, lifestyle choices, aspirations – ALL ours.
Calling it a “natural tragedy” is really just a shrewd way of pretending that we aren’t the ones holding the knife.
And the silence isn’t accidental.
Follow the money and it makes uncomfortable sense. Media owners often have their own capital tied up in hotels, dams, and infrastructure sitting in the same fragile mountain zones – telling the truth about climate vulnerability would spook their own investors.
Insurance companies have every incentive to keep these events filed under “acts of God,” because the moment they’re acknowledged as man-made, the claims start piling up.
And destruction, grotesquely, is great for GDP. Yes! How? Rebuilt roads and bridges mean fresh demand for steel and cement, which is indeed good news for contractors and politicians. It’s the mountain porters and poor laborers who actually paid for it with their lives – Who on Earth cares about them anyway?
Then there’s the comfort we take in religion and in science – both twisted into excuses.
We lean on folk beliefs in a God who created the Earth for our consumption and who will sort everything out, because it lets us shrug off the weight and throw ourselves off the hook.
Real spirituality was never meant for that. Spirituality has always been grounded in honest self-enquiry. And self-enquiry doesn’t ask for blind devotion alone, it asks for honest self-observation paired with intent.
Science gives us an escape hatch too. When researchers say an event was driven by climate change with 99% certainty, they still have to say “probable” – that’s just how rigorous science talks.
But politicians and media outlets seize on that one word as a loophole, using it to claim nothing’s really proven, buying time until the story quietly dies.
The mountains, of course, couldn’t care less about any of this. The physical countdown is already running.
Steep 60–90 degree slopes are only held together by permafrost, which acts like ice cement. As it melts, the entire mountain risks a collapse.
Over 6,000 glacial lakes are now sitting unstable, and warmer temperatures mean rain has ever more been replacing snow.
The speeding rainwater erodes soil, silts up riverbeds, and pushes disaster frequency up five to twenty-five times.
Even in the best case, capping warming at 1.5°C under the Paris Agreement, the Himalayas still lose at least a third of their glaciers. In the worst case, it’s nearly total loss within the century.
Within twenty years, rivers like the Ganga and Yamuna will start permanently dropping as their glacial source disappears – a direct threat to two billion people.
And there’s a darker possibility buried in the permafrost itself: ancient viruses, frozen for millennia, which human immune systems have never encountered!
And here’s the thing nobody wants to say out loud: this was never a molecules problem.
When the ozone layer was dying, we fixed it, because fixing it just meant swapping out CFCs in fridges and air conditioners.
Carbon, well, is nothing like that. It’s stitched into every desire, every festival, every party and funeral, and in every other lifestyle choice that we make.
It’s there in animal agriculture and dairy too – one of the biggest contributors to climate change, and one of the most conveniently ignored.
EVs, carbon capture, green taxes – none of these technological fixes can touch a crisis that’s rooted in desire. This is a crisis of consciousness, not of engineering.
Acharya Prashant, the Indian philosopher and Vedanta exegete, puts out the solution as “Mass Education of the self” – that’s where he says the way forward actually begins.
What is required is a real shift in what we even mean by success and happiness, away from the endless chase of more (and more!). Yes, buy less stuff!
And this is the part nobody on Instagram wants to hear – confronting desire itself, not just the emissions it produces. Counting carbon molecules isn’t enough if we never question the wanting that manufactures them in the first place.
Every unnecessary purchase, every appetite dressed up as “aspiration,” is a small vote cast for the next flood.
Real change starts the moment we’re honest enough to ask: do I actually need this, or do I just want to want it?
Real spirituality was never about performing rituals for personal gain – it’s a life examined closely enough that greed has nowhere left to hide.
The porter carrying bricks up a landslide-prone road doesn’t need our sympathy on the 7 PM news. He needs us to consume less, and so the mountain is asked to give less.
If we don’t transform our consciousness, the world we leave our children (if at all we would want our future generations to be left out on a sinking ship) will be harder to live in than death itself.
It’s time to stop the theatre, look into the mirror, and just confront the truth.
Pause for a moment. Share from clarity, not impulse.