Fifteen-year old Atharva Tewari is a self-described coffee enthusiast from Lucknow, India, where he is currently in the 11th grade.

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Every morning people wake up to see the world as it is, the same worries and the same rush to reach an elusive platform of success and happiness. But in our habit of hurrying we forget to stop and see the world not as it is but how it should be. All that liveliness is fossiled away. We fail to realize that the life that we were given was never meant to be cycled down the same lane. Life was given us to learn, to grow, to be ourselves. When a child enters the world of realism and enclosure, he opens his eyes to the sparkle of hopes and desires, but his naivety shields him from reaching out to achieve those goals. From the very first moment in a child’s life, he is overburdened with expectations. Innumerable sanctions are imposed on him, manners are grilled into him, completely demolishing the idea of open thought which had just started to grow and nurture. But the naivety of the child keeps preventing him. It begins to wither away and then the “AWAKENING” takes place. Now the child is also approached by someone in the black cloak, with the beauty that calls him out loud, he then being convinced follows it everywhere until he falls in the trench of freed. That naivety, when it meets with its fate and withers away, gives rise to the shiny and luminous fruit of CURIOSITY. Curiosity is not someone questioning, it has its own reason for existing: it fosters the spirit of greed, the greed for knowledge, the greed for perfection, the greed for excellence. As a child grows up, he is fascinated by the shifting world, by hearing someone speak. He has that inner voice that tells him that he is weird, he is strange and that he is different just because he can speak, he is not like us. That jealousy is cultivated in his heart and when it finally comes to his ego, he utters a word; that’s the beginning. Naivety may die with childhood but curiously remains even after you die. Never ever lose your holy curiosity. When the child finally begins to settle in and is a little more comfortable than he was earlier, he loses his differentiation and he is able to fill up the bifurcation between us and him. He starts to think, he uses his brain, he uses his intellect, he starts using his imagination, and he starts exploiting himself. He still may not be knowing everything, but imagination is more important than knowledge. It is important to foster individuality for only the individual can produce new ideas. Knowledge is less important than imagination, as it is limited whereas imagination gives  birth to evolution. The creativity fostered inside a child is what decides what he is to become. The ruins of the fate of an individual is not in his hands, it is in the mighty hands of the smaller him, the naïve him, the unknown him, the oblivious him. The traits that are included in a child in his early years deeply affect his life and future. In life, anything that grows is added up and multiplied, but as our person develops, as we climb the stairs, we also lose something. This is how we grow: just like a satellite or shuttle thrown into space, the more it sheds the higher it goes, but some parts are always meant to remain, for emergency landings, like kindness and modesty. Candidly interpolating, try to give anyone the richest childhood, the best that you can afford, so that once he/she grows up, you can proudly boast, “I was a part of them”. Don’t love someone for abilities, love them because they are them. Remember, no matter how high you reach, just try and rediscover that naivety you lost in the beginning – and if you got that, well that is just fabulous!