🏠 Pratigya Abhiyan · Academic Head, 2023 → now
A low-SES, mixed-age, first-generation, loosely-structured academic-tutoring model - teaching children six days a week, two hours every evening.
What does an Academic Head do?
Three years in, I know every child by name - their strengths and their off days, which volunteer they like studying with, what songs they love, what they carry from home, their family and sibling dynamics. I've even taught most of their first cousins. That's the real advantage: getting to just be with them, enjoying what they do and why, collecting all those random stories.
And then there's the logistics. Ten children, two volunteers - who do you pair with whom? Only two classrooms, kids from Grade 1 to 12 - who sits where, based on what each child needs? You decide fast, you keep listening, and you're still teaching yourself the whole time, because it's an NGO and there's never quite enough hands or resources.
And the title itself? The visible positions were quietly kept for whoever worked in the limelight - the usual favouritism and politics. Academic Head came to me for the one reason that isn't political: I'm the one who actually knows the children.
UDAAN - the part no one prepares you for
UDAAN: why does it matter?
UDAAN is the one event where these children finally get a real stage - to perform the extra-curricular skills they've practised, in front of their parents, the way private-school kids get to by default. The catch is everything around it: the staffing, the politics, the thin resources. Three years of it could never fully prepare me - there's always something new going wrong. And that's exactly what taught me how an NGO really works: how to work within the constraints, and still enjoy my role and live my best life inside it.
My journey over the years
Across 2024, 2025 and 2026 I grew into the overall Performance Head - a big leap, and a strange one: I never had the formal authority, but I led anyway.
2024
First year. I didn't really know my role yet - I was exploring everything, like every other first-year. But I couldn't sit there with the children who weren't performing, watching them stare at the ones who happily were. So I stepped in and led a six-minute dance performance with 21 children.
2025
Second year. The strange in-between: you finally have some authority, but you're squeezed from every side - seniors, juniors, your own batch - everyone quietly keeping the people in position happy so they'll be handed the lead next year. I was always leading from the back. More than anything, it taught me how not to behave once you're in a leadership role.
2026
The year I didn't lead - and led anyway. The people in position couldn't pull it together, so it landed on me. And I shaped all of it: the ideation, assigning and mentoring volunteers, watching every single performance, deciding how many children and what each act was trying to say - while also running a whole act myself alongside.
For three years I'd watched parents walk away from UDAAN with nothing for themselves. So this time I didn't want just an annual day - I wanted an experience parents could actually learn from: a story that followed a child growing up in a low-SES home - the pressures from the world, from parents, from academics all at once - and how a parent can understand and stand beside them through it.
Children were the reason I kept going. They always are. Administration management isn't my thing, but it shows up anyway - and when the volunteers, the children, and most of the time even the people in charge all come to you when they need an answer, I think that proves the point. Who's in the lead, anyway?
The main day is a game of chance. The magic is everything before it - a month of small, casual, everyday wonder, run on three hours of sleep.
🔬 STEM Conclave 2026 · Student Experience Lead
In the middle of UDAAN, a research project, my final papers and my academics, this event dropped into my lap. The irony of an NGO: it uses you like a sponge and rarely hands you the authority to match - yet you're still expected to deliver, on top of everything you're already carrying.
I was designing an experience for first-generation, low-SES 10th-graders about to enter 11th grade - kids weighing whether to choose science, who had never been introduced to it, or shown what it could look like in their future. The whole student experience was about capturing that and bringing it alive: making it feel real, making it feel theirs, making them feel they belong here.
The hard part was mapping four stations so 100 girls could explore an engineering college from every side - and clubbing it all into a single hour: briefing every volunteer, meeting each child at her level, telling the teachers why each station mattered, and leading right alongside. Every detail mattered, and every detail was designed by me in some way. Sanjhi Sikhiya organised it, bringing together Avanti Fellows, Youth United and Pratigya Abhiyan's volunteers - but this was the part I designed and led, from the front and from behind. A step closer to what I want to build for elementary children, and a glimpse of what's possible under my leadership. The Indian Express covered it too, at the level they can imagine. I wanted to give them an experience that finally lets them visualise themselves, and think: maybe this is for me too.
yes, that's me & a duck puppet 🦆