When I walk through modern cities, I often feel as if the Earth is holding its breath. The roads radiate heat, the drains choke, and the sky seems to shrink behind glass towers. We speak of progress, but we have forgotten that survival itself is the highest form of progress. Look closely at any major city today. Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Chennai — each one tells the same story in different accents: the story of forgotten rivers, vanished ponds, and stolen greens. 

The 50-50 balance (50 per cent governed by the natural world and 50 per cent by humans) has been broken so badly that most cities now have less than 15 per cent green cover. A city that should have had half its space breathing freely has sealed itself in asphalt. That imbalance shows up in our health, rising heat, polluted air, floods in the monsoon, drought in summer and an epidemic of anxiety and breathlessness. Heat islands form wherever trees vanish. A patch of bare concrete can be five to ten degrees hotter than a tree-covered zone. Multiply that by millions of square metres, and you understand why cities now feel like ovens. The tragedy is that we have normalized this suffocation.