Baaton Hi Baaton Me
Josh Meets Lucknow Motivates the People
The city of nawabs has been known for its literature, arts and culture. Vaad-vivaad has always interested the people of the city. The citizens love to discuss social topics at length. Be it the local chai ki dukaan or high-end cafes, we love to bring out our thoughts on subjects ranging from politics to food to social issues.
Keeping this in mind, JOSH Talks organised an open house discussion forum, JOSH Meets Lucknow, on 25th June 2016 at Hotel India Awadh, Lucknow in partnership with Amity University, Lucknow Campus as Education Partner, Youth Ki Aawaaz as Impact Partner, LUCKNOW Society and The Lucknow Observer as Media Partners and Bootstrap as Outreach partner.
JOSH Meets Lucknow was about stories, passion and change. JOSH Meets Lucknow invited change makers from varied fields, the people amongst us, who dared to do something different, dared to go beyond the conventions and make big changes and yet have remained in the shadows. JOSH meets Lucknow brought such people out into the light.
Josh Talks is an annual conference that takes place in Delhi every year and brings together dynamic individuals from the fields of entrepreneurship, social activism, stand up comedy, business, performing arts and more onto one stage. The event was attended by 1500- 2000 people from the age group of 16- 25 years. JOSH Talks bring to one stage, individuals who are doing remarkable things with their lives, to share their story with the audience and push them to dream big and take positive action in their lives. The mission of JOSH Talks is to use the power of stories to inspire the youth to take positive action in their own lives and inculcate in them to drive, to get up and go after their dreams.
JOSH Meets is a smaller, informal format of JOSH Talks conceptualized with the aim to foster conversations.
JOSH Meets Lucknow had a very interesting line-up of speakers for this session. The first speaker was Nirman Dave who is a 19-year-old young innovator, programming and entrepreneurship enthusiast who has developed more than 200 windows applications which sum up to over 1 million downloads.
The second speaker of the day was Babar Ali who is named the ‘youngest headmaster in the world’ at the age of 16 years. He started a school, Ananda Siksha Niketan in his backyard, when he was just 9 years old.
The next speaker for the session was Anurag Awasthi who has set up SaveIndiaGrain.Org, a social enterprise to deal with the problem of malnutrition and post-harvest loss in agriculture. Ankit Agarwal motivated the audience with his story of how he started a social enterprise called HelpUsGreen with a mission to save the Ganges by flower cycling the waste from places of worship & providing livelihood to 1200 rural families.
Next up was Usha Vishwakarma who started Red Brigade Trust, a self-defence group to save thousands of girls from sexual abuse. It was founded in 2010 and is a group of survivors of sexual violence.
The last speaker of the day was KM Yadav, an RTI activist. His story is an inspiration to us all. He was a tea vendor who quit his job in Kanpur and has filed more than 800 RTI applications to help villagers in UP fight for their rights.
The meet ended with a very fruitful and enthusiastic interactive session with the audience and the speakers.
JOSH Talks came to Lucknow for the first time with people from diverse backgrounds of art, sport, entrepreneurship, social activism, stand up comedy and more to one stage, to share with us their journey highlighting the obstacles they overcame to find their true calling. JOSH Meets Lucknow was one of a kind event and the citizens would definitely wait for another interesting session in the coming days.
Kapil
Writer is a student of Law and active Social Worker.
(Published in The Lucknow Observer, Volume 3 Issue 4,July 2016)
