Covid forces many students to come up with new skills

Hyderabad: Cooped up in homes for more than a year, unable to attend physical classes in view of the coronavirus, many students have been left clueless. But, Covid has also forced many to emerge out with new skills and discoveries.

Meet a City-based, Vedanth Nath (15) who embraced the lockdown blues and unlocked a new journey of entrepreneurship. He began a digital platform, 'World Youth Media' dedicated to youth.

He believes that to break barriers of high vocabulary and complex pieces of data, "we are often expected to consume and instead we aim to provide ideas and facts in a much simpler and engaging manner."

He said "with online barriers limiting us from doing what we planned for, we resorted to our collective interest as a team. We, with World Youth Media, are building a young team that makes this experience simplified. Our team's innovative minds make the content youth need."

His liking towards books has led him to this path of entrepreneurship and has always been interested in spreading awareness on water conservation and rain water harvesting. "We tied up with Blue Hyderabad to spread awareness across the State and among youth."

Although, they faced negative pushbacks due to their age, they used the social media for creating a platform which would be connecting them to like-minded people across the country. Currently, teams of 25 members are based across the country providing bite-sized news of less than six minutes. They summarise the journey of real life mavericks in less than one minute, the power minute breaks down complex topics into simpler bits and the talk shows are interactive interviews with inspiring people.

Given the ample time to be innovative during the pandemic, Vedanth learnt coding and web developing for his platform. The 25 members have received a good response resulting in many youngsters to join learn and practice content writing and proper usage of social median platforms and educating youth through YouTube and other digital platforms.

"We started connecting with parents' communities and started putting a word about the initiative. There are also youth who have participated in this initiative from the US. We make videos from scratch so that these youngsters have a little background about the concept." said the entrepreneur.

He said they are privileged enough to have an opportunity to create such an organisation. Also, understanding the need to extend this opportunity for betterment of those who are denied this. With this mission, they have a fundraiser being organised to facilitate online education for children of an orphanage in Hyderabad. "We want to reach out to many more activists and social change workers and connect with schools." He says youngsters should be focused more on ideas and look for a possible solution to problems." says Vedanth.