Shonairra
Aradhya

I am sixteen, an IB student at Institut Le Rosey in Switzerland, and I am from Bengaluru, India. Almost everything I do comes back to one question: what actually helps adolescents grow up well, rather than what reassures the adults asking.

So far the answers look like three things. A qualitative study with the Indian Council of Medical Research and NIMHANS on what a parent’s phone feels like from the other side of the room, on which I am first author. A foundation, Sva, that turns psychology into toolkits and peer circles a school can run without me in the room. And four years as a trained Well-being Ambassador, which is mostly four years of learning to listen without immediately being useful.

The interest was personal well before it was academic. I have a sister ten years younger. Watching how fast a small person’s behaviour bends to whatever is around her made cognitive and social psychology impossible to walk past.

I also grew up around educators. My grandfather is a Padma Shri decorated educationist, and he set the family’s bar for what a life of service is supposed to look like.

Outside all of that: choir every semester since I arrived, a rock band called O’9, three productions and two years on the lighting desk. Next is a psychology degree, and after that social entrepreneurship in mental wellness and education.

Todo Open item 7. The grandfather here and the grandfather at the Ankali relief camps in 2019 are almost certainly the same person. No source says so, so the two are left unlinked. One word confirming it makes this one of the best lines on the site.