Home, Climate, and the Spaces In Between

 Climate change was once a distant concern, a crisis framed in the abstract, something that belonged to the future, something for “our grandchildren’s time.” Even a decade ago, it was still perceived as slow-moving, invisible, and too complex to grasp. How do you comprehend a phenomenon that is atmospheric, dispersed, and global, with countless causes and even more fragmented solutions?

My journey into climate change research began during my postgrad when I worked on a project involving Arctic indigenous communities. Witnessing the precarity of their environment and the resilience of their traditions, I was struck by an unsettling thought to study it in my homeland, the Himalayan region, which remains one of the most climate-vulnerable zones in the world. However, having the interest to pursue research and actually securing adequate funding and institutional support is a rocky road. Through extensive exploration and the unwavering encouragement of friends and family, I was fortunate enough to find an opportunity to continue my research.

Leaving behind the familiarity of home in the hills, I now spend most of my time in campus (apart from fieldwork). This physical distance has created a paradox: I study the Himalayas, yet I remain detached from its everyday rhythms. I miss the events, festivals, and informal human conversations that could offer deeper insights into the very subject I am researching. Growing up, my understanding of extreme weather was limited to the grim, misty monsoon, the season when roads turned treacherous, travel became a struggle, and landslides disrupted life. Climate change was not a term I heard often or, to say, has no clear word in the native tongue, yet its effects were already embedded in the complaints of my elders and now the adaptations of daily life, like drying water from the nearest springs. Once in a while when I go home, as I sit on my window, gazing out at the evening sun setting over distant blue mountains, I reflect on how much my perspective has shifted.

In the past five years, I have lived in six different cities across India (which I flaunt like an achievement of some sort; it's not), migrating for work and education. Each place has taught me something new, but one lesson stands out: weather is not just an external force; it shapes mood, productivity, and well-being in ways we rarely acknowledge. Of all the cities, Bengaluru felt the most alive to me, its pleasant climate a rare comfort, albeit at a high cost of living. Although my research focuses on the Himalayas, my institution IIT Dhanbad is based in Jharkhand, one of central India’s major coal-mining regions. Here, winter is fleeting, and the scorching summer heat arrives like an uninvited guest as early as March. The heat does not just discomfort; it exhausts, suffocates, and drains. Temperatures soar past 45°C, a scorching reality that makes me question how people survive prolonged exposure to such conditions. Being from the hills, my friends and I find the weather here to be an additional challenge, impacting both our mental and physical well-being. As I prepare to begin my fieldwork, I often think back to my college days in Darjeeling, how my friends and I used to long for summer, craving the warmth of the sun after months of cold, how summer for us was about fancy floral dresses we get to wear once in a while. Now, I find myself dreading the same sun, knowing its brutal intensity in the plains. I think about the tea garden workers, their labour divided between relentless sun and monsoon downpours, their struggles documented by researchers like me, often from the comfort of air-conditioned rooms.

For too long, the climate crisis has been framed as a matter for scientists, policymakers, and economists. But climate change is not just an academic problem; we may call it a lived experience. It is the exhaustion of a labourer under the sun, the anxiety of a farmer watching unseasonal rains destroy crops, the silent migration of people forced to leave homes they no longer recognise. During one of my classes, a professor once said, "be brave enough to admit that much of what we learn in the field may be lost in translation, remain confined to written words, and may not lead to tangible difference in the issues we're trying to address." This statement has stayed with me. It is a hard truth to accept. What if the research, despite all its depth and effort, remains just another report? What if the data I collect fails to make a difference to the people whose stories I am trying to tell?

Yet, just because death is inevitable doesn’t mean one should stop living. Some stories need to be told, even if they do not immediately lead to solutions. Some knowledge matters, even if it does not translate into policy. But perhaps in that uncertainty lies the most important lesson of all: that climate change is not a distant story. It is happening now, shaping lives in ways we are only beginning to understand. And whether or not our work leads to immediate change, the act of bearing witness still holds value.