What will you do when the rising seas destroy your home?
In 2019, climate scientists predicted that most of Mumbai city would be underwater by 2050. This shocking prediction should have been front-page news, discussed daily on prime-time television, and every politician should have been speaking about it! Alas… it was quite the opposite. Tired of waiting for political change, this performer decides to make her own back-up plans to survive the climate crisis. She cannot sit idly by as the sea takes over her city; she needs to be prepared! In a unique interactive performance, Meghana enlists the help of her audience to ensure that by the time the apocalypse comes, her plans are water-tight.
This programme marks the second event in our series leading up to Mumbai Climate Week, presented in collaboration with the National Gallery of Modern Art, Mumbai and the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (TIFR), in partnership with the Government of Maharashtra’s Department of Environment and Climate Change, and supported by the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation.
An urgent, participatory evening that asks how we prepare, adapt, and imagine survival in a city shaped by water.
Meghana AT is a theatre artist and a theatre addict, who works as an actor, writer, director, producer, pedagogue. She has worked in Mumbai’s theatre circuit since 2012. She has collaborated with several theatre artists including Mahesh Dattani, Trishla Patel, Rehaan Engineer, Quasar Thakore Padamsee, Faezeh Jalali among others. She has a Master’s in Authorial Creativity and Pedagogy from The Academy of Performing Arts in Prague. As the founder of tafreehwale, she aims to build a space for playfulness, research, pedagogy, and activism.
Read moreWhat do you do when the future you’ve been warned about begins to feel inevitable? When rising seas are no longer a distant environmental concern but a looming presence shaping how you imagine home, safety, and survival? This performance confronts that unease directly, using storytelling and theatre to turn climate anxiety into an active, shared experience.
The work is rooted in a disturbing scientific prediction: that large parts of a coastal city like Mumbai could one day be underwater. Such a warning should have triggered relentless public discussion and decisive political action. Instead, it was largely met with silence. This absence—of urgency, accountability, and collective response—becomes the emotional starting point of the performance. Faced with inaction, the performer decides not to wait any longer.
Rather than presenting climate change as a distant catastrophe, the piece frames it as something intimate and immediate. The performer imagines what it means to prepare for a city transformed by water, creating multiple backup strategies for survival when existing systems fail. These plans are not polished or heroic; they are vulnerable, practical, and sometimes unsettling. In imagining them, the performance exposes the uncomfortable truth that many of us are quietly doing the same—thinking about escape routes, contingencies, and personal safety in a world growing increasingly unstable.
A defining feature of the performance is its participatory nature. The audience is not treated as passive spectators but as active contributors. Their thoughts, reactions, and instincts are woven into the unfolding narrative, blurring the boundary between performer and witness. This shared responsibility mirrors the climate crisis itself: it is collective, unavoidable, and impossible to solve in isolation.
Moments of humour puncture the heaviness, allowing space to breathe before the weight of the questions settles in again. The performance moves fluidly between playfulness and dread, reflecting how people often cope with overwhelming realities—by laughing, imagining, and improvising their way through fear. Yet beneath the lightness lies an urgent provocation: personal preparedness can only go so far in the absence of systemic change.
What lingers after the performance is not a solution, but a reckoning. How prepared are we for a future shaped by climate instability? What does survival mean when the city itself is at risk? And at what point does adapting quietly become a form of acceptance?
By transforming climate crisis into a lived, participatory experience, the performance refuses apathy. It insists on attention, imagination, and collective thinking. In doing so, it reminds us that when the water rises, survival is not just about having a plan—it’s about confronting the reality together.
