Want to make change? Let young people tell their stories | Anshul Tewari

89.64 - 115.602 Anshul Tewari

But there was absolutely nowhere to go. My friends who I spoke with, my teachers who I spoke with, they all reminded me of the only thing that mattered, and that was how I performed in my exams. And that's it. So I was extremely disappointed, very frustrated, and the only thing that I knew and I loved was writing. So I started a blog. I had absolutely no idea what I was doing.

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I just went online and I started writing. And I forced my friends to read what I was saying. My first story was actually about climate change, and I remember asking a friend to read it, and she went ahead and she commented on it. And the comment was a smiling emoji. So I was disappointed because I wanted more.

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I realized that, you know, a lot of us young people, we grew up in this culture of silence. We are told, don't question, don't think critically, don't ask too much. And that was something that really frustrated me. I loved writing, like I said, so I thought that I'll do something interesting. I launched a writer's training program.

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Young people, they want better jobs, they want to be skilled, so I thought I'll skill them in writing. And by that time, by the way, I had about a thousand readers on the blog. So I thought about 30 people will apply, at least 30 people will apply for this program. And to my surprise, only two did. So I took those two and gave them the best that I had.

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Every single day, I would train them on how to write better. But what they were writing about was actually tough issues. Gender, discrimination, climate change. Issues that we're not taught to talk about. And something slowly began to shift in them. The more they wrote, the more they began to question. They started acting. They started wondering why things were the way they were.