Be it promoting peace or creating awareness about social issues, the youth of today has always played an active role. They are the ones full of energy and enthusiasm; they are the ones killing it with innovative start-ups. They are the torch bearers, and they are the hope.
Stop Teaching, Start Acting
As individualistic as it may sound, focusing on self is the first step towards helping the government promote cleanliness or promoting any other campaign for that matter. These days we easily switch to moral policing, without giving a second thought to our own actions, we are ready to judge. The need of the hour is to get to work, and do our bit before preaching. If a teacher wants his young pupils to keep the classroom clean, he needs to pick-up the broom himself to set an example. Everyone else will soon follow. Charity begins at home, change too.
Organizing Street Plays
Nukkad Natak or street plays have long been India’s popular art form to communicate messages. There are a lot of young, emerging theatre groups that can help in creating awareness about the environment and issues related to it. These street plays can be performed at schools as well as at public places to generate awareness. Sometimes all it takes is a little poking, and underlining of the obvious; and street theatre is good at it.
Participating In Volunteer Programs
Sometimes, just sometimes, it’s important to think about the larger good. Money is important but sometimes it’s good to indulge into something that may not satisfy our monetary appetite but will serve bigger societal goals. It’s important for us, the youth, to participate whole heartedly in volunteer programs to promote green and healthy environment. Nothing of this sort exist around you? Well, keeping a check on what’s happening in your locality, your street, your neighborhood, and your own house, is also a sort of volunteering that requires a lot more conviction.
Initiating and Innovating
An Indian start-up Bakeys thought of an innovative idea to replace plastic cutlery with edible ones. Another India based start-up HelpUsGreen is preserving river Ganges from becoming a ‘religious sewer’ by recycling flowers from temples and mosques into lifestyle products thereby providing livelihood to over 1200 rural families. There are many other start-ups and innovative ideas born out of today’s youth to contribute in making the planet a greener place to live.
Boycott Plastic For Real And Forever
We talk about it, and write articles about it but when the vegetable seller packs our vegetables in a plastic bag, we accept it quietly. We still line our garbage bins with that black plastic bag because we are too lazy to look for an alternative. Plastic is a monster, let’s put it straight. A recent Times of India article titled “79% of plastic in landfills, water bodies states, “An international journal, Science Advances, of the US-based non-profit organisation, American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), has come out with a new study on plastic, quantifying its production and explaining how 79% of the total plastic waste of 6,300 million metric tons (MMT) is accumulated in landfills or in the natural environment (river system and oceans). The study also highlighted that if the current trend continues, “roughly 12,000 MMT of plastic waste will be in landfills or in the natural environment by 2050”.
From turning the government upside down, to launching revolutions and passing important bills, the youth has done it all. It’s high time we do our bit in making the earth a cleaner place to live.
