How and when did you get interested in climate change?

Isn’t it a bit soon for that?

But don’t you think writers of fiction need more time to reflect? The best novels about large events like wars have come years later.

You’re quite dismissive of formal political structures dealing with climate change yet you feel religious groups could change things. Aren’t religious groups as motivated by individual interests and agendas as political groups?

You write about the Arabian Sea and the impact on Mumbai. Do you have any observations on the effect on the Karnataka coast?

How do you think we came to believe that we won’t be affected by these vagaries of landscapes?

But people there are building luxury houses on the seafront. Extreme events and evacuation plans don’t seem to be top of their mind…

Your book opens with you being caught in a tornado in Delhi in 1978. If that tornado happened now, do you think all those people would have run to take shelter or towards it with cell phones to capture it?

BENGALURU: When he was writing ‘In an Antique Land’ in the 1990s, author Amitav Ghosh found himself in Bengaluru, whcih he describes as "a lovely city", often because he was doing research in Dakshina Kannada district, but his last visit here was about a year ago on a book tour for his Ibis Trilogy. This time, Ghosh is in Bengaluru to promote his non-fiction work, ‘The Great Derangement – Climate Change and the Unthinkable’, in which describes the way human beings have adopted a “culture of consumption” without paying attention to environmental changes as “the great derangement of our age”.I’ve always had a keen interest in our natural surroundings, our interactions with the environment around us. Writing The Hungry Tide (2004) played a large part. In the Sundarbans, even round about the year 2000, you could see quite clearly the impact of climate change. I read a recent study on the sex trade in Kolkata and apparently it’s increasingly filled with women from the Sundarbans. After Cyclone Aila (2009), in large parts of the Sundarbans, which were once cultivated, there has been seawater intrusion. It takes 10 to 15 years for the land to become cultivable again and so people are moving to the cities to do all sorts of jobs. And I’m sure it’s not just Kolkata, you see it across the country, the working class is from the east — Odisha, Jharkhand, Bengal. You can see the way climate change is already changing the demographics of the country, and this is just the beginning. If you think about the ways in which migration has destabilized the world in the last year — Turkey, Greece, the whole of Europe. This is going to be one of the clearest impacts of climate change — massive out migration.What’s interesting also is that there is no way of disaggregating climate change impacts from other social factors. I’ll give you an example, in Bangladesh, there were these terrible house and factory collapses, hundreds died. The coverage was mainly about bad building technology, bad labour practices, all of which was true. But I also read a study which said most of these workers are displaced people from Barisal district, which is right on the sea and the salt water intrusion has been quite extensive there. So people have been forced to abandon their land and go to Dhaka and start doing jobs of this kind. When we an issue, our first instinct is to put upon it a familiar template, but there are unfamiliar things happening that are not readily visible to the eye. This other aspect that people are losing land, driven to migrate to cities to take up absolutely substandard jobs, that is an aspect we tend not to pay attention to.Somehow in India because there is such a whirligig, people don’t seem to have any understanding of the depth and seriousness of the threats that face us. Take the case of Chennai — it was a traumatizing event but when I tried looking for writing about it, there’s nothing. Similarly, the Mumbai floods. There’s reportage in those few days but first-hand accounts, memoirs, stories, poems, where are they?How is it too soon? When a traumatising riot takes place, people are producing accounts in days. Mumbai is the seat of Indian cinema, Chennai is the seat of Tamil cinema. There are so many poets and writers and yet nothing in the mainstream about this experience. Why does this not register? You could say my hope for this book is that it will start these conversations, make people raise these questions.I agree. Fiction does take a long time. It takes a long time for these things to percolate, but as I said 2005 in Mumbai is already 10 years ago... The argument I’m trying to make is it’s strange that literature and literary fiction, which has always considered itself at the forefront of thinking and creation of ideas, has been largely in denial about this issue. Fiction and literary fiction represent a mainstream consensus within society. Here is this thing unfolding on our doorsteps, what is stopping us from looking at it? One of the great gaps is that most of the climate science comes from the west. That’s why I wanted to do this event at IISc, to bridge the gap.I’m not saying they’re going to ride to the rescue. I’m saying if we are looking for hope, that’s one direction to look at. The Pope’s encyclical was such a powerful document, and there are Hindu, Muslim and Buddhist groups looking at climate change but a majority are going in the other direction. So many religious figures in India are essentially salesmen. In Hinduism, which used to be a religion of austerity and asceticism, there seems to be a push to consume, consume, consume. It’s really quite shocking.So many cities, like Mangaluru, a city I really love, have to prepare for this. The fortunate thing is Mangaluru is not built in an exposed location. Mangaluru, Kochi, these are old, pre-colonial cities and the people who founded them had intimate knowledge of the land and the sea. But the colonial cities were built by people who did not know the intimate vagaries of the landscape.Till the 17th century, the sea was considered strange and scary. If you go to Indian beach resorts, you will notice the older people will not go near the water, it’s scary for them. The younger people have been exposed to a western world view. Another example is Fukushima — in the Middle Ages they had stone markers saying this is a tsunami-prone region don’t built here. Not only did they build there, they put a nuclear plant. What in our time has given us this belief, this arrogance that lets us think we can do things that people never did before? We’re incredibly exposed, we don’t realize it. People think the poor will be worst affected by climate change but that’s not true. I think it will be the middle classes. The rich can fly off in their helicopters to safer places and the working classes still have their rural connections. They have somewhere to go if an evacuation order is given. What will the middle classes do? They have built their lives in the city, they have no other connections. There are some aspects of climate change none of us can do anything about but at the level of preparedness, we can do more. For citizens in threatened areas like Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata, it is very necessary that they pressurize governments to prepare evacuation plans. If you study most states’ disaster management plans, they relate to post disaster management. But in the case of a cyclone, evacuation is possible and you can save countless lives. It’s been very effective on the east coast in Odisha and Andhra Pradesh. In Odisha, there is a well-oiled machinery for evacuation but they are dealing with largely rural populations. What will you do with urban populations?Yes, who goes and builds a house right on the beach? The one absolute certainty of climate change is sea level rise and yet we’re rushing closer and closer to it. In Chennai, Mumbai, Miami, people are building these luxury buildings right on the seafront. And no one is asking questions. This is what I call the Great Derangement. This is some kind of craziness. But in some sense, this is not different from the fact of the writer who lives through a terrible flood and is unable to address it. I was in Mumbai and I met these two great artists, who were very badly affected by the 2005 floods, their daughter was stranded they couldn’t reach her for two days, they lost a lot of work. I asked them did this experience enter your work in any way? They both said no. I would have though especially as visual artists, it’s easier. But this is the problem in the arts now. Pictorialism or any kind of figurative art is thought of as illustrative, which has become a pejorative. All these ways in which we could have connected with the world around us are being shut off. This is our predicament. The one absolute certainty of climate change is sea level rise and yet we’re rushing closer and closer to it.I think exactly that. If I were that age today, I would probably be (mimics posing for a selfie) and I would be shredded, but there you see, that’s the point. People have become used to living these virtual lives; it’s become a circumstance where all of life seems to flash by on a screen but unfortunately all of life doesn’t flash by on a screen, sometimes life comes and gets you.