Category Personalities

Who is India’s young climate warrior?

The defining moment

Thus began Licypriya’s activism. Though her father supported her, her mother was wary as she was worried about her future. But Licypriya decided to move forward and raise her voice against climate change and for disaster-risk reduction.

A year after Licypriya travelled around the world, having been invited by countires to address at events, her mother decided to extend her full support.

Licypriya garnered national attention in June 2019 when she protested in front of the Indian parliament. She protested for weeks, holding a placard urging Prime Minister Narendra Modi and other Members of Parliament to pass the climate change law to control and regulate carbon emission. In doing so, she also became the one of the youngest climate change activists and earned the title ‘India’s Greta Thunberg’.

Soon, she was invited by several organizations and countries to talk about climate change. In September 2019, she was invited by UNESCO Partners’ Forum 2019 in Luanda City, Angola. She addressed the topic of climate change along with prominent leaders from African countries. She also took part in a climate strike in Luanda City along with over 50,000 children and youth.

In October, she started the Great October March 2019 at India Gate, New Delhi, with thousands of others. The March, which took place in various locations in the city, requested immediate action on climate change and the enactment of the climate change law in India. The same month, she brought out a device called SUKIFU (Survival Kit for the Future) to curb air pollution. The zero-budget kit (a portable mask) is designed from trash to provide fresh air.

From Manipur to Madrid

In December 2019, she was invited by the United Nations to speak at the 2019 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP25) in Madrid, Spain. Though she was invited, she had to find a way to get to Madrid. Her father wrote to the Indian government requesting sponsorship, but there was no response from them. He then decided to crowdfund the tickets for them to Madrid. Her mother had to sell her gold bangles to book hotels for them. However, just as she was set to leave, the Spanish government intimated her about them sponsoring her accommodation.

When she made it to COP25, she became one of the youngest climate change activists in the world to address at the forum. She also got the chance to meet her inspiration Greta Thunberg, the Swedish activist.

For her activism, Licypriya has won several awards including the Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam Children Award by the Khwad Foundation and World Children Peace Prize from Global Peace Index – Institute for Economics and Peace.

What makes her special?

Licypriya persistently worked towards her passion of speaking against climate change despite lack of support, first from her mother, then from the governmental activists in the world and has world leaders listening to her speak.

 

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Who is Akshay Ruparelia?

Sometimes, great businesses start from a small idea. And if you keep an eye out, you might just spot the idea, like Akshay Ruparelia, the teenager from Harrow, London, did, Akshay set up an online real-estate business when he was 17, after he realised the hefty sum charged by high-end real estate agents in the U.K. Today, his business is one among the many successful ones in the U.K.

The idea

Akshay is from Hemel Hempstead in Hertfordshire, England. Living with his parents, both of them hearing impaired, Akshay was shocked to discover the costs.

After finishing his GCSEs (equivalent to Class X) he developed an app called HouseSmart. The app was aimed at connecting property buyers and sellers. However, he scrapped the idea even before launching it.

Then, when he has studying for his A-levels, Akshay came up with the idea of doorsteps.cp.uk, a real estate website that he developed.

Setting up the site

Still a teenager, Akshay needed money to make his dream reality. He turned to his family and relatives for loan and they obliged. Akshay managed to obtain a 7,000-poind loan, a majority of which was provided by his uncle who had started and sold two online businesses of his own.

With the initial amount, Akshay managed to set up a very basic website and have it up-and-running from the bedroom of his house in 2016 when he was just 17.

The first client

Akshay knew that he might not get a client immediately. And he was patient. A few months after starting his website, he got his first customer from East Sussex, England. The customer wished to sell his house and some land, and Akshay decided to pay a visit to the place himself. He had his sisters, friend drive him since he was underage for a driver’s licence.

He met the client and got to work. A few weeks later, he managed to sell the house for a good rate, and Doorsteps received its first five-star review. Akshay, though, could not celebrate his success immediately since he had to study for his A-level examination.

Slowly and steadily, Akshay’s business began to grow. Still in school, he enlisted a call centre to take calls from clients when he was in school. Once home, he would attend to them. As his business began to grow, Akshay employed a network of mothers who show clients houses that are up for sale for a fraction of the cost that other real estate agents charge.

 Akshay’s business became so popular that in just over a year since it was started, it was listed as the 18th biggest estate agency in the U.K. This also made him the country’s youngest millionaire.

Today, Doorsteps continues to sell houses and is among the top companies in the U.K.

What makes him special?

Akshay identified a problem when he was helping his parents move homes and decided to devise a solution to tackle it. He worked hard, balanced education and business and managed to set up a successful business at a young age.

 

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Why Anita Vachharajani is famous?

Anita Vachharajani was born in Bombay (now Mumbai) and has lived here all her life. She considers herself a Bombay girl to the core. “I think I first started in Class III, trying to put together a story with illustrations. My writing was poor, which didn’t matter to me. But the fact that I had not been able to draw well upset me!” reminisces the writer. You see, she was surrounded by the most gorgeous Russian picture books her mother used to buy her from roadside stalls on her way to work. “My standards for visuals were clearly high. I think I wrote my first poems in Class VI, and luckily, I have very faint recollections of my work from those days,” she laughs.

In fact, she confesses she fought being a writer – due to a lack of confidence – for the longest time. At 29, when she was at home for health reasons, she began thinking of children’s books, and had her first book published at the age of 31.

Anita’s inspiration

Anita says she is inspired by a great deal of sources. “If I had to name two, it would be Russian picture books (published in the former Soviet Union, and translated into English and other languages) and ‘Target’, a wonderful children’s magazine that was edited by Rosalind Wilson, a British educationist in India. The magazine’s delightful illustrations and its humanistic values have stayed with me.” Naming some of the remarkable contributors to “Target”, she says, “One of my favourite writers was Sigrun Srivatsava, and Atanu Roy, Jayanto and Ajit Ninan were the most memorable illustrations for me.”

The writer’s routine

Anita loves researching and nose-diving into projects. She likes to do a lot thinking and research before the actual writing process begins. “That is fun but it tends to become an obsession. So, often, I have to pull myself out of the rabbit-holes of research,” she adds.

A writer’s life is not easy. Anita confesses that it takes her a long time to warm up to work, and she’s easily distracted as well. See, it’s not only students who get distracted! “It doesn’t help, though, because my process is slow to begin with – ideas have to rattle around in my head for really long, and then suddenly, something good, something small yet solid will pop up one day,” says Anita.

But Anita is happy to celebrate her ‘slowness’. “It’s hard to explain this to family and friends, and I’ve decided that after years of being ashamed of my slow pace, I am now going to celebrate it. Any creative work needs the luxury of time and space to grow. We need to be kind to ourselves and give ourselves time for creative growth.”

Writing like Anita Vachharajani

Write, simply write, is what Anita has to say to all you budding writers out there. “Writing is a muscle, like art, Maths or spelling. The more you use the muscle, the more it – and you – will grow. If you can, write in a journey every day,” she adds.

“Young writers often feel impatient writing for no audience, like if the story or paragraph you’re writing now is not meant to be submitted (to a school magazine or a creative writing class), then if there is any point in doing it.” But she insists that the idea behind writing regularly is to write for the sake of writing. To simply put pen to paper. “When you practise Maths or spellings, for example, there’s no point asking, “But who will see this?’ You practise because doing sums or spellings often will make you better at them. Writing regularly is the same, but it’s definitely challenging to find the discipline to do so,” she explains.

If you do write a journal, but are worried about siblings, parents or friends taking a peek, you can always blog, she suggests, adding, however, that writing long-hand – with pen and paper – is a great tool and has huge cognitive and mental-health benefits.

Anita says, “I believe that only aimless creativity can lead to productive creativity. You need to write to lots of fun stuff, lots of rubbish, all for yourself, till you reach a point where you feel that finally you’re saying what you want to say how you want to say it. That’s why writers have drafts and more drafts!”

But apart from building the writing muscle, writers need to have skills such as observation, empathy and a decent vocabulary. “So it makes sense to ride buses, to observe all sorts of people and wonder about them, to read lots of books and to be kind – to oneself and to the world!” she says.

Bet you did not know that Anita loves cities and forests. She loves walking around and exploring places, she loves trivia, she loves black coffee, and she feels that if she ever went back to school, she’d hope to pay more attention to her science education, instead of just chomping through literature and history.

Anita’s Vachharajani’s books

  • Amrita Sher-Gil Rebel with a Paintbrush
  • Amazing India – A State-by-State Guide
  • Tara Tambe, Forest Friend!
  • The Puffin Book of Spooky Ghost Stories

 

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Why Mikaila Ulmer is famous?

If you were stung by a bee, twice, around the same time, you will probably run away from them the next time you see them. But four-year-old Mikaila from Austin, Texas, the U.S. became fascinated with them and is today selling lemonades and donating proceeds from her sales to organizations fighting for the survival of honeybees. This is her story.

Two stings and a cookbook later

In 2009, when she was just four, Mikaila’s parents, both with business degrees, encouraged her to come up with a product for an upcoming children’s business competition and for Austin Lemonade Day. She put on her thinking cap and was coming up with ideas when two interesting events happened in her life – in a span of two weeks, she was stung by two bees, and her great grandmother who lives in Cameron, South Carolina, sent the family a cookbook of hers from the 1940s.

These two moments were to define the path Mikaila was going to choose.

After she was stung by the bees, her parents encouraged her to read up about them and the things they do for the ecosystem instead of becoming averse to them. When she did her research, she learnt about the importance of honeybees and that their population was declining.

That’s when her great grandmother’s cookbook came in handy. Mikaila decided to use a special recipe of flaxseed lemonade her great granny used to make to start her own lemonade stall and help honeybees by contributing proceeds from her stall for their conservation.

This is how her company Me & the Bees was born.

An entrepreneur and a bee ambassador

Mikaila’s company made and sold flaxseed lemonade sweetened with local honey sourced from local beekeepers.

Year after year she would sell out of her Me & the Bees lemonade stall at youth entrepreneurial events and donate a percentage of the profit towards bee conservation.

As the business kept growing, her parents helped her strike the balance between her business and her school life.

In 2015, Mikaila’s business made a breakthrough when it won a contract to supply lemonade to supermarket chain Whole Foods Market. The same year, Mikaila appeared in the U.S. reality show “Shark tank” where she pitched her product to investors. Making an impact, Mikaila found an investor who invested USD 60,000 in her company.

Two years later, a consortium of current and former American football players invested USD 8,00,000 in Me & the Bees lemonade.

In 2015, Mikaila was also invited to the White House by then U.S. President Barack Obama.

Today, Mikaila has sold over a million bottles of her lemonade in the U.S. and is giving speeches at entrepreneurial conferences and workshops. In 2017, she launched her own non-profit – the Healthy Hive Foundation – to conduct research, education and protection projection for honeybees.

Her company continues to donate 10% of all profits to bee conservation groups.

What makes her special?

Her dedication, presence of mind and thought. Despite being stung by bees, she decided to read up on them and help towards their conservation by coming up with a business based on a recipe her great grandmother had sent her around the same time.

Today, even after being in business for nearly 10 years and selling millions of bottles, she continues to donate towards bee conservation.

 

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Which kid invented device that converts energy from ocean currents into electricity?

Hannah Herbst from Florida, the U.S., is a teen inventor and social innovator. Currently studying Computer Science at Florida Atlantic University, Hannah believes computers provide a great platform to make people’s lives better.

Hannah has been involved in extra-curricular activities since she was very young – she has dabbled in singing and athletics. In her seventh grade, she was introduced to engineering as a platform for problem-solving when she attended a summer engineering camp. She was the only girl at the camp, which involved building robots. She learnt from her peers and online articles about how to program and build robots. Hannah found the camp interesting and started to develop an interest in engineering.

Later the same year, when she received a letter from her pen pal in Ethiopia, she realised how engineering could be used to solve problems such as energy poverty. This led to the birth of what was later called BEACON.

What about the letter inspired her?

When Hannah was in the fourth grade, her teacher introduced her class to a programme called Compassion International, where kids can connect with other kids in the world through a pen pal letter-writing system. During this programme, Hannah befriended Ruth from Ethiopia who was a few years younger than her. Ruth and Hannah would exchange letters every now and then.

Time passed by and when Hannah was in her seventh grade, Ruth wrote to her about the problems she was facing due to energy poverty. These included lack of electricity and access to clean water.

Hannah was moved by the problems faced by Ruth and people living in similar situations, and decided to use her newly found interest in engineering to create a device that would solve Ruth’s problems.

A BEACON of hope

Living in Florida and being surrounded by big bodies of water, Hannah decided to focus on using water her source for power. She started building a device called BEACON (Bringing Electricity Access to Countries through Ocean Energy), which would tap energy from moving water and convert it into usable electricity. This could be used to charge batteries as well as a way to purify water using a process called two-phase microfiltration.

Initially, Hannah built a big, complicated, wave energy-collecting device, but the device would keep breaking. Her Science teacher urged her to take a different path, but she found it difficult to move away from the first prototype she built. She thought it would work.

However, she moved on, and working with her mentor, she finally built the prototype. BEACON fetched her the title of America’s Top Young Scientists in 2015, as she won the Discovery Education and 3M Young Scientist Challenge. BEACON was exhibited at the White House Science Fair, and Hannah has spoken about her invention at the United Nations Science, Technology and Innovation Summit.

She wishes to make BEACON a commercial device soon.

What makes her special?

Hannah empathised with Ruth’s problems and decided to use her interest in engineering to help her. Despite her prototype breaking several times, Hannah never gave up until BEACON became a reality.

 

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What are the best-selling stories of Roald Dahl for young readers?

Roald Dahl (September 13 1976 to November 23, 1990) was a British author of children’s books. Born in Wales to Norwegian immigrant parents, Dahl served in the Royal Air Force during World War II. He became an ace aviator and intelligence officer. He grew to prominence as a writer in the 1940s with works for both children and adults. In 1953, he published the best-selling story collection “Someone Like You” and went on to publish the popular book “James and the Giant Peach” in 1961. In 1964, he released another highly successful work, “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”, which was later adapted to film twice. A few of Dahl’s most popular works include:

James and the Giant Peach (1961)

This is a book about a lonely little boy who lives with his two mean aunts. One day, James gets a bag of mysterious things from an old man. The crocodile tongues that the bag contains squirm into the ground and a giant peach grows. James notices a hole in the peach and crawls in to escape from his aunts. Once inside the peach, he meets a giant Old Green Grasshopper, a Ladybug, a Spider, a Centipede, and an Earthworm. They start out on an amazing adventure. The book won widespread critical and commercial acclaim.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (1964)

Three years after his first children’s book, Dahl published another big winner, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. An eccentric businessman, Willy Wonka runs a fantastical chocolate factory. Wonka hides five Golden Tickets inside his bars of chocolate. The finders are to be rewarded with a tour of his factory and a lifetime supply of chocolate. Charlie Bucket’s adventure begins when he finds a ticket and wins a whole day inside the chocolate factory. But, he has not idea of the surprises that are in store for him! Some critics accused Dahl of portraying a racist stereotype with his Oompa-Loompa characters in the book, but that never deterred him from writing more.

Fantastic Mr. Fox (1970)

The main character is a clever fox that talks, his wife and four little foxes. In order to feed his family, he steals food from three cruel farmers, Boggis, Bunce, and Bean, every night. The vexed farmers attempt to capture and kill him. How Mr. Fox outwits the farmers makes a delightful tale.

Over his decades-long writing career, Dahl wrote 19 children’s books. Despite their popularity, these books have been the subject of some controversy, as critics and parents have balked at their portrayal of children’s harsh revenge on adult wrongdoers. But that has not stopped children across the world from devouring his books with glee!

 

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