I’ve just come back from an evening of having met up with 10 YP Alumni, who worked with us anywhere between 3-5 years ago. We caught up over the little details, the happy memories, the recurring arguments, absorbed how we had grown, changed, made a difference in our own ways, each of us having found (or in the process of trying to find) our place in the world. For me, this moment is more than about affirmation. It is recognition of the work that these young people have built in The YP Foundation since its founding in 2002 and the transitions they have overseen. It is almost with a huge sense of pride that I watch many of them work in development spaces today – some are lawyers, others are studying and a few are transitioning from non-profit work to working with the government at a state level.

Earlier this evening, one of the groups struck up a conversation about how the YP has given us the space to make realizations that we often take for granted today about the lack of power, rights and privilege faced by young people and what we can each do, in order to change that. Many of them notice the changes it has made in their approach to their work, their sensibilities, their decisions, and experienced shock when they graduated and actually saw how excluded young people are from development and policy spaces in India. They realized how much needs to be done to ensure that all young people’s human rights can be recognized. We rested on the agreement that there are far too many gaps between young people who work at the field level, with communities and at larger international policy tables, or those who live in the glasshouse comfort of their homes.

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Why me? Is a 5 line document that we were asked to write about our time in the project and why I worked here.

I wrote :

“Because I can. Because I want to be a child again. Because I want to learn how to work with 125 children and understand their quirks, their spectrum of emotions and their thirst for knowledge. Because I want to help them.

Because I want them to help me. Because I am an artist a sportsman or just a person who wants to impart their skills to children. Because I want to have fun! And just play with them. To understand how individuals from different backgrounds are beautiful and interesting and driven, kind and selfless yet naughty and angry and fun. To understand them and let them understand us.

Why me? Because every you can make a million me’s and all of us together want to make a difference.”

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