This refers to the editorial, “After Chennai deluge, the many challenges” (December 4). Nature seems to have lost patience with man’s increasing disrespect for it. Within three decades, technology has compressed time and space for commercial and financial world, to create over-dense urban pockets of affluence. Town planners could not factor in such growth over a long time frame, to lay down sustaining infrastructure, be it roads, open spaces and civic utilities. The resultant craze for locations around existing facilities blew up the cost of land, seeding avoidable nexus between developers and civic bodies. Nature cannot be balancing human follies forever.