TED Talks Daily
Want to make change? Let young people tell their stories | Anshul Tewari
28 Aug 2025
As a teenager, social entrepreneur Anshul Tewari didn’t see young voices represented in the conversations that mattered. His solution? A simple blog that has since transformed into Youth Ki Awaaz (Voice of the Youth): India’s largest citizen media platform, where more than 200,000 young people write about underrepresented issues every month. From stories of bringing electricity to forgotten villages to launching national climate campaigns, Tewari reveals how authentic storytelling can build individual and collective agency for change.For a chance to give your own TED Talk, fill out the Idea Search Application: ted.com/ideasearch.Interested in learning more about upcoming TED events? Follow these links:TEDNext: ted.com/futureyouTEDSports: ted.com/sportsTEDAI Vienna: ted.com/ai-viennaTEDAI San Francisco: ted.com/ai-sf Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Full Episode
You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hugh. For social entrepreneur Anshul Tiwari, what began as a personal blog became a movement of change-making stories.
In this talk, he shares how Youth Kiowaz, a digital platform made to give Indian youth a space to speak out on social issues, has turned into a powerful tool to harness the power of young voices, proving that making an impact can be a daily accessible habit.
In 2008, when I was 17, I felt invisible, and not like Harry Potter with an invisibility cloak. I actually felt really powerless. I remember watching the news every single day with my parents. It was like a ritual in our house. And the more I saw it, the more I realized that I just couldn't relate with it.
The people didn't look like me, the issues didn't feel like mine, and more than anything, young people's voices were nowhere to be found. Now, I've grown up in a family where everybody cared deeply about what was happening in the world. So naturally, we had a lot of conversation at home. I had many opinions, many perspectives and experiences that I wanted to share with the world.
But there was absolutely nowhere to go. My friends who I spoke with, my teachers who I spoke with, they all reminded me of the only thing that mattered, and that was how I performed in my exams. And that's it. So I was extremely disappointed, very frustrated, and the only thing that I knew and I loved was writing. So I started a blog. I had absolutely no idea what I was doing.
I just went online and I started writing. And I forced my friends to read what I was saying. My first story was actually about climate change, and I remember asking a friend to read it, and she went ahead and she commented on it. And the comment was a smiling emoji. So I was disappointed because I wanted more.
I realized that, you know, a lot of us young people, we grew up in this culture of silence. We are told, don't question, don't think critically, don't ask too much. And that was something that really frustrated me. I loved writing, like I said, so I thought that I'll do something interesting. I launched a writer's training program.
Young people, they want better jobs, they want to be skilled, so I thought I'll skill them in writing. And by that time, by the way, I had about a thousand readers on the blog. So I thought about 30 people will apply, at least 30 people will apply for this program. And to my surprise, only two did. So I took those two and gave them the best that I had.
Every single day, I would train them on how to write better. But what they were writing about was actually tough issues. Gender, discrimination, climate change. Issues that we're not taught to talk about. And something slowly began to shift in them. The more they wrote, the more they began to question. They started acting. They started wondering why things were the way they were.
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