TESTIMONY FOR YOUTH ALLIANCE

Contributor: Dev Tayde

Tejal Didi and Dev Bhaiya during Gramya Manthan

Growing up in India I witnessed Alliances built on fragile transactional grounds of sharing cabinets in the corridors of power. Others formally referred to as Joint Ventures scurried wealth producing promises that began obscured, on mostly social and ecological grounds, leaving those two progressively dilapidated as the quarters fought boardroom graphs and pressed profits.Youth Alliance as it does to all associated with the organization, made me think. Deep and hard, slow and fast. Wrap the thoughts or be wrapped around them. And if you are talented enough rap them. For me, the paradigm of Alliance shifted. Massively.

Youth Alliance encourages the aggregation of thought within and the assimilation of thoughts, raw and real, into a space nurtured with deep dedication and love by the Team. Spaces that offer acceptance and exchange of raw and real thoughts are rare in India. Most of us have been altered through our education to provide template responses, year after year. Some of us loved the monotony so much we voluntarily failed to have another delicious chance to stuff up and vomit it out at the exams.

"Youth Alliance lives values. At Gramya Manthan they are not offered on a platter. And you cannot fetch it from the counter as you do at coffee shops. Your name won’t be called out. You will be."

I was lucky to see the genesis of Youth Alliance when Prakhar was single and lighter. What hasn’t changed is the drive and simplicity explicitly visible in the Teach For India first cohort Fellow I met back in 2009. Youth Alliance Team veterans Shefali and Shashank are stellar examples of living one's belief system. Youth Alliance Alumni Ajay Etikala, Itika Goyal and Tejal Rajyagor (purely alphabetical order Mataji) have inspired my thought process through their actions. Youth Alliance today is a family that I feel extremely grateful to be part of.