Nepal’s flood is not a warning, it’s the crisis unfolding

I was sitting in one of the small restaurants off the road near the Teaching Hospital in Kathmandu, arguing with a young man from the city, barely into his twenties, about whether Nepal's problem was that it had built too much or too little, when his phone began to fill up with the first videos from Rasuwa. Brown water, moving far too fast, taking a road with it. He had been making the case, with the fluency of his generation, that the country had thrown concrete at its rivers and was now paying for it. Within an hour, the argument we were having had been overtaken by an event that did not fit either of our positions, and it is that mismatch, between the frame we reach for and the thing that actually happened, that I have not been able to put down since.