Headlines from the Future

In October 2025, Dasra commissioned Kaivalya Plays to design a twenty-five-minute experiential intervention for a gathering of youth leaders, civil society practitioners, and urban governance stakeholders.

The brief was specific: surface citizen-driven aspirational narratives around urban climate resilience — taking in waste, affordability, gender, and youth — and generate concrete ideas for improving engagement between citizens and their elected representatives.

Working within a tight window, the session used rapid collective storytelling, including headline-from-the-future exercises in which participants wrote the news reports they hoped one day to read about their own cities. Consent-based interaction and embodied brainstorming kept the room participatory rather than declarative, and ideas were captured through live visual documentation as they emerged.

The format was chosen deliberately. Convenings on urban climate resilience tend to produce well-argued positions and few surprises; improvisation asks participants to commit to an idea before they have finished defending it, which tends to surface aspirations that more formal processes edit out.

For Kaivalya Plays, the commission marked an entry into complex civic and governance ecosystems, aligning cultural facilitation with the work of climate resilience and systems change.