Ten year old, Ishita Katyal from Pune has given yet another speech at a TED event in Vancouver, which is considered to be the ‘nerdy conference of the world’.
TED 2016: taking place in Vancouver, Canada from February 15 to 19, is attended by renowned scientists and innovators from tech giants like Google, Apple and Tesla and eminent personalities such as Al-Gore and Bill Clinton.
But it was this little girl who stole the lime light with her talk on Monday as the conference opened.
Her message ‘Put children first; give kids a chance’, was simple and insightful. “Instead of asking children what they want to do when they grow up, you should ask them what they want to be right now,” she told an amused brain bank of audience.
Image Courtesy: Facebook
“We can do a lot in this moment, in the present. The problem is our world has many forces working against the dreams of children.” She went on to add that adults underestimate kids and in the process they pass on fear to children who are born without fear.
The majority of audience, who on an average were perhaps six times older to her, absorbed the mild admonition and responded with applause as she pressed on to issues such as hunger, education, and war.
“My dream for the future is that people think 10 times before raising school fees, a hundred times before going to war with another country, a thousand times before wasting food and water, and ten thousand times before letting their child’s childhood go away”, she said.
“I hope you adults can look after the world long enough to give us our chance,” she added
Ishita concluded her speech to a standing ovation by the audience which included A R Rahman (who performed a little later in the opening session), scientists, poets, philosophers and musicians from various parts of the world.
