Dr. Daanish Mustafa: Transcript

NP: Kripa and I began ClimArts as an outcome of our own lived experience and desire to work with a climate expert and see how science and art can be combined using the language of art. And today we just wanted to share a very tiny excerpt from one of our works, and we want to invite our collaborator whom we are very lucky to have today on this call Dr. Daanish Mustafa to say a few words and then play the video. Daanish over to you.

DM: Thank you. Thank you so much for inviting me to this wonderful forum. This is so much more enjoyable than any academic conference that I've been to -- you practically lose your will to live halfway through the through the proceedings. Over here you feel like to keep going and keep going. And therein lies the crux of the matter.

It has been an absolute pleasure working with the Kripa and Neelambaree on this wonderful dance medium. I must profess my extreme ignorance of the medium. But, even that ignorance was kind of enjoyable in terms of actually working with them and seeing through the excellent work that they have done about a topic which is something very close to my heart -- the 2022 floods in the Indus River basin, which led to incredible human suffering over there.

And we academics tend to be big on words and short on communication, unfortunately. And over a period of time, when you spend enough time in academia, you learn that the world is just full of stories. And many other people, artists in particular, are so much better at telling stories than many of us academics are. And there, it has been a learning experience for me and a privilege for me to be with the Neelambaree and Kripa and to also learn from other presenters in this particular medium.

I think that not enough of this happens. We are too busy marking papers. I was planning on marking papers during this particular conference, but it turns out that I did not because it was so much fun actually watching what everyone else was presenting. So, I think that…conveyance of the emotion, of the sensibility through motion that happens in dance or visually in terms of the visual medium or through comedy -- comedy is much-needed, mind you. Through all of these mediums, I think that they can be such an effective mode of taking this climate conversation out of the ivory tower or the hallowed halls of political ramblings and disagreements and posturing and actually make some sense to everyone out there to whom it's really gonna matter, in a lot of interesting kinds of ways. So, it's been an absolute privilege for me.