A popular historical fiction set in South India opens with a celebration. Around a vast, ocean-like lake, a reservoir built by a benevolent king where life is simply thriving. People are happy. The fields are lush. Water is at the center of everything: Festivals, trade, ritual, daily life. The author describes it with such joy that you almost feel the cool air rising off the water.
I couldn’t stop thinking about that image.
That reservoir wasn’t just beautiful. It was one of the finest examples of ecosystem service design in history, conceived and put to sustainable use somewhere between 907 and 955 AD. A king who understood, over a thousand years ago, that water is not a resource you extract. It is a relationship you maintain.
You and I are roughly 60% water. The Earth is 71% water. Numbers so big they feel meaningless until you hear the one that matters:
Of all the water on Earth, only 1% is available for human consumption.
One percent. And that is the thing we take most for granted.
We leave taps running. Unfixed leaky pipes. Nearly 3 trillion liters of water wasted in the US alone. We build cities on lakes without thinking about the watersheds and the life that thrived in and around them. Worse, we treat rivers as drains. We have somehow convinced ourselves that water will always be…just there.
The ancient king building that lake in 10th century South India knew better. His people knew better. The celebration around that reservoir wasn’t just festivity; it was gratitude. An acknowledgement that water makes life possible, and that life, in return, owes water its respect.
This World Water Day (22 March 2026), maybe that’s the thing worth sitting with.
Not the statistics. Not just the crisis headlines. But the older, simpler knowledge that a civilization thriving on the banks of a human-made lake understood intuitively a thousand years ago:
Water is not infrastructure. Water is life itself. And you don’t take life for granted.
What is the historical fiction? Ponniyin Selvan by Kalki, and the lake is the Veeranarayana lake of the Chola era (now known as the Veeranam lake in Cuddalore, Tamil Nadu, India). The fiction - worth reading. The reservoir - worth remembering.
Fig: The Veeranam (or Veeranarayana) lake in Cuddalore, India was the backdrop for the opening sequence of the Tamil classic Ponniyin Selvan. (Image courtesy Kailash Sugumaran, shared under the terms of license CC BY-SA 4.0)1
1 This image, taken by Kailash Sugumaran, was shared under license CC BY-SA 4.0