“Not listening to what the youth of today has got to say is giving birth to many mental health issues like stress, anxiety, and depression.”, says Mr. Nikhil Taneja, the co-founder, and CEO of Yuvaa, a community-driven platform that works towards empowering the youth by encouraging them to share their stories.
Nikhil along with his co-founders Amritpal Bindra and Anand Tiwari, through Yuvaa, aims to provide the youth, a content platform that is purpose driven. Yuvaa provides a listening ear to all those who wish to share their stories and be heard. It encourages the youth to share and listen to each other’s stories, thereby bringing India’s youth closer.
Established in 2018, the Yuvaa team, until now has visited about 30 cities and 100 colleges, where they encouraged the students to open up and share their stories. The response that this initiate received has been heartwarming states Nikhil.
In the current world, where every single person is busy living his/her life, there are very few who take out the time to listen and also share stories with their loved ones. Many however feel ignored and less loved. Youth, a major component of our population feels ignored. This has given rise to the number of people suffering from mental health problems.
Taking a dig at the challenges the youth face, Nikhil states that in spite of them having very few people listen to them, the youth try to fix their own problems by looking out for a solution, they don’t shy away from raising their opinions and most importantly are very expressive.
He talks about the most common problem the youth of the country faces; it is the fight for marks and the immense pressure every young individual goes through, of living up to the expectations of parents and society. Nikhil goes on to mention that irrespective of all the pressure these young individuals receive from their parents and society, they are still empathetic, loving and most importantly understanding.
With so much that the team has already done, Yuvaa’s future plans are even more interesting and definitely intriguing. The co-founders are currently on a journey of understanding and studying how the youth of India thinks, based on which the trio plans to embark upon a journey of making documentary films, web series and also movies.
On being asked if the whole idea and purpose of establishing Yuvaa worked well, Nikhil recollected an incident. “During one of our visit to a college, a student stood up and began narrating his story. The student was known to be a bully to everyone around him. The reason for this was because he had been molested by an acquaintance during childhood. Hence he displayed himself as a bully as a defense mechanism. After he shared the story with us, he decided to confide in his parents. The same day at 11:30 pm, I received a long text from him telling me how he opened up to his parents and how supportive they were of him.” says Nikhil with a smile.
The impact of storytelling encouraged by team Yuvaa is thus strongly seen among the youth that deserves to be heard.
Nikhil Taneja has some really interesting insights for the youth and a much-needed word of advice for all of us. Watch his complete interview by clicking on the link below.
