NIDHI PARALIKAR

There are also those of us who are what I would call auxiliary adults. The aunts and uncles. The teachers and facilitators. The family friends, the neighbours, the people who are in a child's life not by obligation but by circumstance and by choice. We matter too. The question of whether we are doing our best for the children in our lives belongs to all of us. Not only to parents.

Confused. Angry. Sensitive in a way nobody had language for. I was the worst version of myself at 13, and it took years to understand why. This piece is about what Indian teenagers are carrying right now: the data, the pressure, the social media they didn't ask to grow up inside, and the world that got harder to trust. And about why a room where none of that has to be performed might be the most important thing we build.

A shared language for their own experiences is developed. Peer support structures are built between them, independently of any hierarchy. And crucially, they understand from the inside what experiential learning actually feels like.