This transcript is being provided for access purposes only. Please don’t download, copy or distribute this transcript. Copyright of the play’s text belongs to the playwright. The playwright asserts their moral rights.

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CLIMATE CHANGE AND OTHER SMALL TALK 

EPISODE TWO: NOTHING HAPPENS BY RAM GANESH KAMATHAM

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SUNNY: You’re listening to Climate Change & Other Small Talk—a worldwide theatrical journey for your ears - minus the carbon footprint and lost luggage. Nine creative teams from around the world share entertaining audio dramas to explore our climate mess. And what could get us out.

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Welcome to episode two! I’m Sunny Drake, your tour guide and series creator. On our previous stop, we heard two individuals totally tanking at dealing with a climate crisis. What about at the level of nations - what’s with the lack of scale of action from political leaders? 

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This question was on the mind of our next playwright from India, Ram Ganesh Kamatham. Ram is a total powerhouse. He manages to hop from research to policy think-tanks to anthropology to playwriting, like a secret agent or something. You can find out more about Ram on our website, climate change & other small talk dot com.  That’s climate change A-N-D other small talk dot com. 

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Ram has been following the ups and downs of international climate conferences. Since the mid-90s, world leaders have attempted to muddle through climate agreements. And we’ll see some of Ram’s observations in his episode, called Nothing Happens, made by QTP in Mumbai, otherwise known as Bombay.

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Let’s get on board our carbon-neutral solar-powered worker-owned balloon.

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[HOT AIR BALOON RELEASING INTO THE SKY]

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It’s time to cruise up over the Indian Ocean. Wait a minute–we’re actually landing right on a submarine–as you do. Let’s climb in and submerge beneath the ocean. 

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You’re listening to “Nothing Happens” by Ram Ganesh Kamatham.

[ROLLING WAVES. THE HORN OF A CONTAINER SHIP. THE CHUG OF THE SHIP'S SCREWS ABOVE, THEN BELOW THE WATER. A THUMP. THE SOUND OF THE SHIP'S SCREWS GROWS DISTANT, AS WE DIVE DEEPER. THEN THE FAINTER SCREWS OF AN ARIHANT-CLASS NUCLEAR SUBMARINE. THE PING OF SONAR.]

JOSEPH: Contact bearing two-two-five.

POOJA: Concur contact two-two five.

JOSEPH: Designate contact on sonar?

POOJA: Negative on designate.

JOSEPH: He's moving off our stern.

POOJA: I see that.

JOSEPH: (PAUSE) Should we tell Conn?

POOJA: They have other things to worry about.

JOSEPH: We could... designate him just in case. Maybe designate him Tango-two.

POOJA: Is this your first deterrence patrol?

JOSEPH: Yes ma'am.

POOJA: Some advice. With nuclear deterrence, we deal in non-events. Our mission success is when we set sail and remain undetected. Our job here in sonar is to orient and observe. And when everything works, and everyone does their job right. Nothing happens. Understood?

JOSEPH: Yes, ma'am. To be honest, no ma'am.

POOJA: Joseph, right?

JOSEPH: Yes ma'am. Petty Officer Joseph Joshi call Sign "Josh".

POOJA: What was your previous posting Joseph?

JOSEPH: Air Traffic Control. Sat in the tower at Kochi. Tracking the navy pilots. Queuing them up on radar, keeping the flight schedules tight, talking them down in bad weather.

POOJA: Nice time there?

JOSEPH: Oh yes ma'am. Pretty place. Willingdon Island, Fort Kochi, Kerala backwaters. Really lovely.

POOJA: Wore your uniform on shore leave? Impressed some pretty tourist girls?

JOSEPH: No ma'am. No, no, no. Well yes.

POOJA: I did my time at ATC Kochi.

JOSEPH: Yes ma'am. We heard stories of you in the academy. Lt. Commander Pooja Panda. Call sign "angry panda". The ferocious Panda. We heard you tracked a Chinese sub from the Sunda straits all the way to Djbouti, and that's why they call you the panda. Panda the panda sonar hero of Sunda. She'll smack your booty to Djbouti…Sorry ma'am.

POOJA: Sonar on a nuclear submarine is a different game altogether from air traffic control. We do not rush to designate threats. We orient and observe. Understood?

JOSEPH: Yes, Commander.

[CLACKING ON A KEYBOARD]

POOJA: They call me the angry panda because with my headset, glasses and frown, I look like one.

JOSEPH: Ah, I see it now.

POOJA: Did you observe anything about the contact at two-two-five?

JOSEPH: I thought I saw a doubling on the sonar. Um. Yeah.

POOJA: Very good Joseph. Can you tell me why the sonar momentarily showed two at Tango-two?

JOSEPH: He was making about seventeen knots and passed us at...

POOJA: I can read the instruments. I'm asking you what happened up there.

JOSEPH: Uhh. Might be a container ship, judging by the speed. And... the little uhhh... this deviation in the sonar feed here. Is uhhh... Maybe a technical fault, something wrong with his screws?

POOJA: Are you happy with this assessment?

JOSEPH: I'm happy if you're happy ma'am.

POOJA: No Joseph. That's not the answer I'm looking for.

JOSEPH: I'm... sorry, Commander. I don't know the answer.

POOJA: That's a start. Joseph this is a deterrence patrol. We are living proof of minimum credible deterrence. We are the triad, we are the second strike. And that's why we're sitting here on a 4000-crore boat, with a nuclear payload of K-4s and K-15s. Nothing gets past us.

JOSEPH: Yes, Commander.

POOJA: No, Joseph. That's wrong. Everything gets past us. That's the point of a nuclear submarine. No one knows where we are.

JOSEPH: Yes, ma'am. We submariners are hunters of the deep, silent killers who…

POOJA: No, no. Listen.

[CLACKING ON A KEYBOARD]

JOSEPH: I see nothing on my instruments.

POOJA: I said listen. Switch to passive sonar.

JOSEPH: Concur. Switching to passive sonar.

[JOSEPH PUTTING ON HEADPHONES. OCEAN WAVES. THE FAINT SOUND OF THE CONTAINER SHIP'S SCREWS.]

POOJA: You can still hear his screws. A container ship swinging past Ceylon.

JOSEPH: Yes, I can hear him.

POOJA: Sound travels further in water through shallows and trenches. But at depth, it also bends and bounces. You hear all kinds of things. You can hear the shelf.

JOSEPH: Yes, my own heartbeat.

POOJA: The continental shelf. And shellfish.

JOSEPH: No no Ma'am I'm a team player.

POOJA: Shellfish.

JOSEPH: No no ma'am I share a lot.

POOJA: Listen!

[WAVES. SOME SCRATCHING ON METAL.]

JOSEPH: What. Is that...

POOJA: Shell. Fish.

JOSEPH: Ohhh... My god that crab must be huge to register on sonar. My god! It's not a crab, it's a it's a giant squid!

POOJA: You need to imagine what's out there, but with sound reasoning.

JOSEPH: Logic.

POOJA: No. Sound reasoning. Reasoning through listening to sounds. Is that really a giant crab out there? Or is there some other reason we are hearing the sound, this loud, this deep.

[MORE SCATCHING]

JOSEPH: There's...Some shellfish is stuck on the passive sonar array? Near the hull microphones?

POOJA: Well done.

JOSEPH: Oh wow. That totally makes sense now. Little guy's scratching the external microphones and we're hearing it magnified in here. Missed the forest for the trees there. Or more like missed the ocean for a drop!

POOJA: Most of the time we're on passive sonar. Listening.

JOSEPH: Orienting.

POOJA: Reasoning.

JOSEPH: Observing.

POOJA: We are interested in all events.

JOSEPH: Yes. No. We are about non-events.

POOJA: We strike hard and fast.

JOSEPH: No. We are invisible. We are the second strike.

POOJA: Good.

JOSEPH: Thank you Commander.

[RHYTMIC BEEPING]

JOSEPH: Incoming ELF!

POOJA: Concur. Incoming E-L-F.

JOSEPH: Receiving.

POOJA: Concur.

JOSEPH: What is it?

POOJA: Our orders.

[HISS OF STATIC. PATCHY BROADCAST COMES IN OVER RADIO.]

AMAR: Crew of the INS Arihanth. This is Rear Admiral Amar Anthony.

JOSEPH: The Rear Admiral of the fleet!

POOJA: It's very rare to hear from him directly.

JOSEPH: He's a legend! Leads from the front.

POOJA: Call sign Ackbar.

JOSEPH: Rear Admiral Amar "Ackbar" Anthony broadcasting from Vizag. Must be big news.

AMAR: Gentlemen. We've received orders from the political leadership. There are two existential threats to our country.

JOSEPH: The Chinese and the Pakistanis.

POOJA: The Americans when they're interested and the Russians when they're not.

AMAR: Climate change and nuclear weapons.

JOSEPH: That's... a bit... abstract...

AMAR: These are abstract threats. And the political leadership has tasked us with the responsibility of eliminating them. Hur hur. We are therefore changing our force posture. And tasking you to neutralize one threat at a time.

JOSEPH: That makes sense.

AMAR: The INS Arihanth will carry out a preemptive second strike on climate change.

JOSEPH: Uhhhhh...

POOJA: Go to alert. Engage intercept sonar.

[BLARNG ALARM]

JOSEPH: Concur. Intercept sonar engaged. Umm...

POOJA: Acquire and designate the target.

JOSEPH: Ahhhhh... How???

 POOJA: Just pick up climate change on the sonar and designate it a threat.

JOSEPH: Isn't a preemptive second strike a first strike?

POOJA: Not necessarily. It's a hypothetical non-event that may or may not be triggered by an abstract threat.

[CONSISTENT BEEP OF THE SONAR]

JOSEPH: We're trying to designate climate change an existential threat and then we're going to nuke it?

POOJA: Hypothetically. That's if a non-event leads to an event.

JOSEPH: And what if we can't track and designate it?

POOJA: Then that's a non-event leading to another non-event.

JOSEPH: That's bad. Or is it good?

POOJA: It's nothing. Nothing happens. That's deterrence.

JOSEPH: And it works?

POOJA: It works until it doesn't. I'm sorry Joseph. No one said the job was easy.

JOSEPH: If we nuke climate change, won't we trigger climate change? Mushroom cloud. Fallout. Ash clouds. Nuclear winter. Temperature change. Extinction level event. Beep beep. Whoosh. Kaboom. Argh!

POOJA: That's sound reasoning.

JOSEPH: Is it? I'm... feeling a little anxiety. Uhh... maybe we should tell the Conn.

POOJA: If Conn wants sonar's opinion, they'll ask. Until then...

JOSEPH: Orient, observe?

POOJA: You got it.

JOSEPH: Ohh boy. I'm... feeling quite some anxiety here.

[A DISTANT SOUND ON THE SONAR.]

JOSEPH: I've got contact!

POOJA: Concur contact.

 [THE SOUND AGAIN, CLOSER.]

JOSEPH: What is that?

POOJA: It's sonar. We've just been pinged.

JOSEPH: What? Is there another sub out there?

POOJA: We're not the only ones down here with sonar.

JOSEPH: What if it's a hunter-killer? The ping came from contact bearing one-eight-zero.

POOJA: Concur. He's... trailing us.

JOSEPH: What do we do? What do we do? What do we do?

POOJA: Keep listening.

[LARGE SCREECHING NOISE “WHALE SONG”.]

JOSEPH: What the...

POOJA: A...

JOSEPH: Wha...

POOJA: Whale song.

JOSEPH: Weird.

POOJA: It's language. They're mammals. Social creatures. They... learn to sing.

JOSEPH: Really?

POOJA: There's a family somewhere near here. This one is young. The big guys have their clicks figured. You can tell he's just learned this song.

JOSEPH: What's it saying?

[SCREECHING]

POOJA: It wasn't a Chinese sub I tracked. It was a whale. Picked him up near Sunda. And I couldn't stop listening. I think he was humming to himself. You know, maybe clicking out a tune on the long voyage. I just followed him. Right through our patrol. All the way through the Indian Ocean. Off the coast of Somalia. Humming a tune, singing a song of the deep.

[WHALE SINGING]

[BEEP]

JOSEPH: Incoming ELF.

POOJA: Concur incoming.

JOSEPH: What is it now?

AMAR: Gentleman. Sorry, I'm told that I must now use gender-neutral terms. Across the world now, women are included in fighting arms of the military to achieve gender parity. So all hands on deck, this is the new arms race! Hur hur. The political leadership has debated on our previous orders. Based on new actionable intelligence. It seems there is a common enemy behind both these threats. These threats are man-made. Hur hur.

JOSEPH: You think.

AMAR: Sorry sorry. I've just been told. By man-made I don't mean to exclude women. In fact our military is inclusive and represents the most efficient arm of government. You have to hand that to us. Hur hur. Right, where was I. Yes. So belay that last order. We will in fact tackle climate change first. And then eliminate nuclear weapons second. Keep up the good work. 

[STATIC]

AMAR: Hold on. Hold on. We've just received new orders from the political leadership. We will in fact, pursue both threats... simultaneously. But we will do so only if others do so, in an equitable and graded manner in keeping with international law, and the principles of natural justice, and prevailing international treaties, and historical inequities, and notwithstanding our economic priorities, and cumulative per capita emissions, and colonial reparations. To demonstrate our resolve and the seriousness of our commitment we will achieve our targets by the year 2070. 20... 70? It's a trap! Is that right? I'll be retired by then. I'll be dead by then. Hur hur. Oh... Oh I see. Right. Well COP 75 is some time away isn't it? Well what is the fleet supposed to do in the meantime? Well yes a nuclear reactor will allow the submarine to stay out indefinitely, but... but... OK look we can discuss this over golf, but hold on, hold on. Is the ELF still on? It is. Ok good. Gentlemen. Dammit. Crew of the INS Arihanth, your new mission men is. And women. Uh. Humans out there. Mmm. Good work. Keep it up. Stand down. Do your jobs. Go above and beyond your duty. Hur hur. As you were, carry on.

JOSEPH: What are we supposed to do?

POOJA: Stand down.

JOSEPH: Standing down. Engaging passive sonar.

POOJA: Concur passive sonar.

[LOUD CLEAR WHALE SONG]

POOJA: He's right above us now.

[ SONG CONTINUES, THEN GROWS DISTANT.]

JOSEPH: Is he... surfacing?

POOJA: Maybe. Heading up for a breath of air? Maybe, heading to just the right depth for his song to travel through the waters.

[WHALE SONG]

JOSEPH: Contact! I hear screws!

[CRASHING SOUNDS. THE WHALE SONG ABRUPTLY STOPS. GURGLING WATER.]

JOSEPH: Was that... a container ship? Why didn't the whale get out of the way? It’s huge. How could it miss a freaking container ship heading its way? It even has sonar! It just... I don't get it. It... should have heard the ship coming and just... changed course. What the hell? Stupid.

POOJA: Missed the ocean for a drop.

[BEEP]

JOSEPH: Incoming E-L-F. Our political leadership deliberating. Incoming E-L-F message. Concur?

POOJA: Negative. I don't concur. I'd like to sit in silence. I want to hear the echoes of that song in my mind. Before long, it might be gone for good.

JOSEPH: Uh... Commander, are you ok? Should we tell someone about what just happened?

POOJA: Nothing happened. This is just another non-event.

[WAVES CRESCENDO. THE SHIPS SCREWS GROW DEAFENING.]

SUNNY: That was episode 2 of Climate Change and Other Small Talk, “Nothing Happens,” Written by RAM GANESH KAMATHAM and Directed by PUJA SARUP.

If you’d like Something to happen, check out the Take Action page on our website: climate change and other small talk dot com. You can also unlock special bonus stuff by subscribing to our newsletter, like behind-the-scenes of both the climate content and the creative process.

If you’re looking for a unique dinner party idea, or content for your class,  you could host your own listening club. We’ve got hosting and discussion resources on our website. 

If you enjoyed this podcast, please share it on your socials, and if you’re on a podcast platform, hit that 5-star rating button - it really helps other people find it. You can also follow us on Facebook: Sunny Drake Productions and on Instagram: sunny underscore drake. Sunny is spelt like the day: s-U-n-n-y.

Next up, we’ll be heading to Nigeria, where a community is juggling competing needs:

EXCERPT: NIGERIA 0:29 - 0:49 (20 seconds)

DELPHINE: I am the Country Head of Save the Trees Foundation. This year, our mission is to save...

NANPET: (Cuts in) Ah... a mission! I see. So you are a missionary of trees! I am getting you. (Laughs)

DELPHINE: I don’t see what is funny.

NANPET: No, you don’t, madam missionary. Please go and save your trees. Let me not stand in the way of your holy calling.

Join us to find out what happens.

Today’s episode, Nothing Happens, starred: 

ALISTAR BENNIS as Petty Officer Joseph "Josh" Joshi

DILNAZ IRANI as Lieutenant Commander Pooja “Angry Panda" Panda 

and NAKUL BHALLA as Rear Admiral Amar "Ackbar" Anthony

Sound design, music and audio mixing by VARRUNN BANGERA

Episode Produced by QTP (India) with support from Sunny Drake Productions

Episode Producer and Production Manager TORAL SHAH 

Recording Studio OCTAVIUS 

And the series Climate Change & Other Small Talk is:

Created by me, Sunny Drake

Produced by Sunny Drake Productions in association with Why Not Theatre

Lead Producers: Fanny Martin and Najla Nubyanluv

Concept Dramaturg: Kevin Matthew Wong

Impact Producer & Climate Dramaturg: Chaprece Henry 

Communications Producer: Daniela Gerstmann 

Central Audio Producers: Heather Brown & Richard Feren 

Special thanks to our series funding bodies: Canada Council for the Arts, Toronto Arts Council and Ontario Arts Council. And to so many others who you can check out on the website. It truly does take a village to raise a podcast. 

Hope to see you at our website and newsletter, climate change and other small talk dot com. Until next time, thanks for being on this journey together.

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