Across the world, futures work is being asked to do more, to respond to polycrisis, persistent uncertainty, and systems that no longer behave predictably. But not every future arrives through breakthrough or design. Many arrive slowly, through repetition. Through rhythms that communities already carry. In South Asia, this logic has a name.
Riyāz/ریاض is an Urdu word for sustained, everyday practice, a disciplined rehearsal to remain in touch with something that is still forming..
The Rehearsal Condition
There are places where the future doesn’t arrive all at once - where change doesn’t build in a straight line, where systems shift in fragments and not in some ‘aha’ moments. In much of South Asia, this isn’t new. It’s how people have lived for a long time, through repetition, return, adjustment, and stubborn persistence.
You see it in how movements come back under new names. In how ideas are tested before they’re named as policy. In how care, repair, and resistance continue even after the project ends. Most of it doesn’t count as conventional strategy. But it keeps things from collapsing. And sometimes, it makes something possible.
This is rehearsal. A way of acting when full certainty never comes. A way of working with what’s partial because waiting for conditions to be ideal is often not an option.
We don’t talk about this enough in futures work because it’s hard to name. It’s what people already do to stay with change that doesn’t settle. And maybe it’s time we took it more seriously.
What Rehearsal Looks Like
Rehearsal often starts as a workaround, a return to something unfinished, or a repetition shaped by necessity. In South Asia, we see traces of rehearsal in everyday adjustments that carry futures forward, deliberately.
In Bengaluru, residents in certain neighbourhoods have begun reactivating the same WhatsApp groups they used for COVID relief — only now, to coordinate water tanker timings during the city’s worsening water shortage. No one was asked to do this. No one named it as a strategy. But the memory of how logistics were once shared becomes a low-grade infrastructure for responding again.
What’s being rehearsed is a rhythm of decentralised coordination, one that softens the shock of infrastructural breakdown by remembering how to move together. The group, the habit, the language of updates, all of it is reused and reinhabited. The future being rehearsed here is one in which state systems are unreliable, and civic response carries the burden.
In the mid-hill regions of Nepal, small farmers have returned to older grain storage practices using traditional bhakari (mud-and-bamboo grain bins), after fluctuating weather and unreliable road access disrupted just-in-time supply chains for hybrid seeds and fertilizers. These storage structures had been phased out as newer agricultural inputs became widespread. But as roads washed out more frequently and transport costs surged, the old methods resurfaced.
What’s being rehearsed is a future where food security depends less on external supply chains and more on localized resilience. It’s a rehearsal of autonomy in storage, of rhythm in planning, and of returning to a slower, more stable agricultural tempo when the infrastructure of modernity becomes erratic. This is foresight embedded in form, in mud, in memory.
In Khulna, Bangladesh, a group of local builders and masons have begun informally reusing raised plinth designs that were initially developed for cyclone shelters, now adapting them for small homes and community kitchens. These adaptations are not part of any formal climate resilience project. They emerge from accumulated knowledge, remembering what stayed dry, what withstood flooding, and how elevation worked.
What’s being rehearsed is a quietly circulated architectural foresight: how to live with rising water without waiting for official adaptation plans. It's a rehearsal of vernacular climate response, a design memory that anticipates future monsoons by returning to what held up last time. What was once a disaster measure becomes a baseline for everyday dwelling.
Rehearsal can stretch between necessity and intent. It carries fragments forward, reshaped by constraint. It opens a space where earlier attempts are neither abandoned nor canonised, where memory remains active, and forms are allowed to shift. And in doing so, it creates a kind of rhythm: adaptive, unfinished, responsive.
Each of these holds a future in motion. They don’t name themselves as strategic or innovative. Their strength lies in persistence, in keeping something accessible, usable, or visible just long enough for the next possibility to take root.
These are the futures that continue in low resolution through return, through re-use, through what is quietly sustained.
What Rehearsal Asks of Futures Work
Futures work, the practices of imagining, shaping, and preparing for possible futures, often starts with structured approaches: horizon scans, linear pathways, imagined transitions. But these tools rarely account for how change unfolds in South Asia, through ongoing attempts, recycled ideas, and moments that blur beginning and end. The shifts people live with here are not always unidirectional. They move in spirals. They take detours. They pick up where something else left off.
In such conditions, rehearsal is the form through which many futures already emerge. People keep things alive even when the official system has moved on. They carry what they can. Sometimes through memory, sometimes through quiet repetition, sometimes through methods that don’t register as “strategy” at all.
This work is not always visible. It doesn’t come with timelines or milestones. But it holds its own rigour. It asks for endurance, attention, and an ability to hold uncertainty for longer than most frameworks allow. In many places, this is already how futures are practiced, not in labs or reports, but in classrooms, on street corners, inside informal institutions and long-standing communities of care.
Taking rehearsal seriously means recognising that the future is not always elsewhere, waiting to arrive. It’s already being held, tentatively, unevenly, in forms that are hard to name, but impossible to ignore.
When Institutions Can’t Hold It
Futures work doesn’t exist outside of systems. It’s shaped by who commissions it, how it’s funded, and the cycles it’s expected to follow. But rehearsal doesn’t align easily with institutional logic. It doesn't produce quick clarity. It doesn't resolve on schedule. It doesn’t always look like progress.
Much of what rehearsal asks for: slow repetition, uneven pacing, partial attempts, sits uncomfortably inside structures designed for outcomes. Programme cycles retreat before practices find rhythm. They miss what moves slowly, circulates informally, or refuses to resolve. The assumption is that futures work should lead somewhere. But sometimes, it’s holding space for what hasn’t arrived, or might never arrive in a recognisable form.
This doesn’t mean institutions are unwilling. Many are trying. But most are structured for proof, not persistence. They look for inflection points, but barely ever look for continuities. They seek to demonstrate influence, and let go of what’s unresolved. As a result, the very practices that make long-term futures possible, the slow, the subtle, the unremarkable, often go unsupported, or unseen.
If rehearsal is how futures are sustained under conditions of uncertainty, then institutional foresight needs to recalibrate. By recognising the kind of work that doesn’t deliver in obvious ways. The kind of work that stays with the unfinished, carries partial attempts forward, and keeps futures in motion even when there’s no end in sight.
Disappearance as Design
Rehearsal doesn’t always fail. Sometimes it just fades by quiet neglect. The effort simply stops being seen.
Systems only remember what succeeded or failed attempts that were ‘sexy’. But futures shaped through rehearsal rarely arrive with clear signals. They begin in fragments, circulate through informal networks, and move without institutional approval. When they don’t become recognisable fast enough, they’re left out of reports, out of funding cycles, out of the archive.
This loss is as much administrative as it is epistemic. Each unnoticed rehearsal forces the next to start from scratch. Knowledge doesn’t build. It loops. And the conditions for deeper learning across communities, across time, are eroded.
Each erased rehearsal narrows what futures can become. Movements lose their second wind. Systems reinvent what was already known. Fragile practices go undocumented. And experiments that didn’t scale are treated as if they never happened. What gets lost are the conditions under which continuity becomes possible.
Without memory, public systems replicate amnesia, recycling pilot projects, renaming known failures, and ignoring the slow expertise that communities already carry.
Should we think of this as a call to hold memory differently? To treat partial attempts as evidence? To build futures that are less about what can be launched, and more about what is allowed to continue?
When Rehearsal is the Foresight
And yet, even as rehearsals disappear from institutional memory, they continue. What looks like informal improvisation is often lived foresight already in motion. In contexts where planning is outpaced by recurring crisis, foresight is an internalised rhythm. Communities often know what will go wrong and how to soften its edge. It’s the quiet intelligence of those who live inside disruption.
These acts don’t begin with forecasts. They begin with proximity. With patterns noticed over time. With instinct built on memory. What often gets called foresight in institutional context: scenario planning, system mapping, already exists here in lived form. More as the knowledge of when the water will rise, when the power will cut, when the promise will be withdrawn and less as tools.
This is rehearsal in action. Trial runs that are never final. Small, circular efforts that anticipate failure and make room for return. With each round, something shifts, an expectation, a response, a margin of safety. We would refrain from calling this foresight work waiting to be formalised. We’d say this is foresight already in practice.
To name it as such is not to stretch the term, but to recover its range. It’s a call to treat attentiveness as strategy and to recognise that rehearsed knowledge, even when tentative or tacit, is not reactive but holds futures in motion.
Rehearsal as Refusal
But we should keep in mind that rehearsal is not always about preparation. Sometimes, it is how people delay resolution that feels premature. How they keep open a space that others try to close. Because the terms on offer are too narrow. Because moving forward too quickly would mean leaving something unresolved, or letting something go that still matters.
In this sense, rehearsal can be a form of refusal. A way to resist finality when it arrives too early. A way to stay with the questions that don’t yet have good answers.
It can look like returning to an idea that was set aside. Or continuing a practice that was never officially recognised. Or making time stretch, just enough, so that something else has a chance to take root.
Refusal rehearses a different tempo. Because the offered pace is politically premature. It resists the pressure to resolve what still needs holding open. Especially when speed is imposed by metrics, funders, or the false urgency of appearing effective. None of this is loud. But it is deliberate. And it reminds us that rehearsal isn’t always about becoming ready.
In Odisha’s Sundargarh district, members of the Paudi Bhuyan community continue to grow millets and pulses using traditional, rain-fed methods even as state agricultural officers encourage a shift to hybrid seeds and input-heavy cultivation. The government offers subsidies, training sessions, and newer seed varieties under programmes meant to modernise agriculture. These require land title documentation, fertiliser inputs, and adherence to new planting calendars. Farmers attend the sessions. Some accept the materials. But when the season turns, they return to their older rhythms, their own seeds, their own timing, their own logic of the land. What’s being rehearsed is a slower form of continuity. A farming system that holds ecological memory, local biodiversity, and everyday knowledge together without needing validation from official schemes. Each cycle of return reinforces a future that doesn’t rely on external approval. What persists is a practice of time, attention, and refusal.
What Rehearsal Leaves Us With
Not every future needs to be imagined from scratch. Some are already in motion through small, sustained adjustments that continue in spite of being overlooked.
If we paid more attention to rehearsal, we might start seeing continuity where we once saw failure. Quiet scaffolding where we assumed absence. And futures already unfolding where we thought none had begun.
This doesn’t mean every partial effort holds promise. But it means we learn to notice what is being carried. We learn to ask what is being returned to and not just pay attention to what is new.
In the end, rehearsal barely offers certainty. It definitely offers rhythm. And that might be what futures work in our contexts needs most. Less of new tools, more of new sensitivities. To what persists, to what returns, and to what never stopped trying.
What if rehearsal was something we built for? Futures pedagogy could begin with partial forms. Planning processes could budget for quiet return. This is about extending its horizon. Because the ability to rehearse well, to sustain, return, and remain responsive, may become the most crucial foresight skill of all.
Design Notes for Rehearsal-based Futures Work
These provocations emerged while sitting with the gaps. We began to see rehearsal as a form of long-term attention, one that institutions rarely build for. What follows is a set of questions that ask: what if futures work was designed to stretch, to re-enter, to remember?
Track the Middle: Most systems know how to record success and flag failure. But rehearsal happens in-between, in the half-done, the briefly-tried, the paused-then-revived. Institutions serious about futures need a spectrum of categories: complete, failures returned to, returned to with revisions, and not complete. This is where long-term intelligence lives.
Fund the second time: Budgets are built for pilots and launches. But rehearsal often begins after the applause fades, when something small is tried again with more friction, less visibility, and deeper stakes. Fund that version. The next attempt.
Measure what stays: Drop metrics that only trace reach or uptake. Ask instead: What was reused? What was altered and carried forward? What fragment survived institutional closure and quietly reappeared? Echo over outcome.
Track the Afterlives: Most documentation ends at ‘handover’ or ‘close-out’. But rehearsal continues in afterlives, in what’s kept alive informally, what resurfaces under a different name, what never fully disappeared. The task is to record what was kept, and by whom.
Stretch the Tempo: Build in tempo buffers. Time that allows partial efforts to loop, drift, resurface. Futures practice needs room to breathe unevenly. Design for tempo elasticity.
This reflection is drawn from Lagori Collective’s South Asian Futures framework, an inquiry that centres partial attempts, situated knowledge, and the quiet labour of staying with the not-yet. It rethinks how futures are rehearsed, inherited, and sustained across the region’s layered ecologies and plural temporal rhythms.
If these notes resonate, we invite you to carry them forward with care in how they are critiqued, reimagined or cited. We see this as a way to amplify voices from the region, and to remind futures practice that no thought stands alone.
Suggested Citation: Kothari, D. & Mutaher, A. (2025). Riyāz (ریاض): Rehearsal as a Way Futures Are Already Practiced. Notes From In Between, Lagori Collective.
Dhaval Kothari and Alifiya Mutaher are design researchers, strategists, and co-founders of Lagori Collective. Lagori is an experimental research and design studio working to expand the conditions under which multiple futures remain possible. Notes from In Between is where we work through how futures are imagined, shaped, and rehearsed from within South Asia.
Notes From In Between is a record of our in-progress thinking, provocations, open questions, and ongoing experiments at Lagori’s South Asian Futures Lab. It’s where we make our process public, not to present answers, but to invite conversation. Check out our previous Notes From In Between - Mausam, Jivrut, Beejaya, Teh and Kal.
"Echo over outcome."
Loved this, so beautiful!
As a dancer turned multidisciplinary artist, this post speaks rigorously to me thank you for articulating.