India’s largest youth festival, the Under 25 Summit, was back in Hyderabad for a second time on Saturday, with a host of inspirational speakers and fiercely enterprising youngsters in the audience. The potential of young India was almost tangible at Satya Sai Nigamagamam, which was packed with over 800 bright minds that were there to seek inspiration in the creative field — design, music, food, hip-hop, filmmaking and a lot more. Ranging in age from 12 to 25 years, the attendees were excited to hear about the experiences of people who had successfully made a career out of their passion.
The event’s host, Vineeth Vincent, kept the crowd in high spirits in between the ten sessions with his beat-boxing skills and effortlessly entertaining personality.
Akaanksh Pothukootchi, an activist filmmaker and environmentalist spoke about the impact of climate change in his powerful talk. The second session was a panel discussion featuring entrepreneurs whose start-up Conçu patisserie, makes most Hyderabadis salivate — Swathi Upadhyay and Sahil Taneja. The showstopper of the event, who kept the audience glued to their seats until the very end, was Bhuvan Bam of BB Ki Vines fame. The fastest growing YouTuber in the country, with a whopping five million subscribers, Bhuvan is a comedian, singer and songwriter. His recent song Sang Hoon Tere, which garnered two million views within nine hours of release, was performed live for the first time at the event.
Bhuvan inspired his fans by saying that there was no excuse for aspirants to say that they couldn’t make it because of external influences. He said, “Earlier, we had to do so much to even get our work noticed but now with YouTube, that’s not the case. For free, you can show the world your content and it solely depends on the content’s quality whether you will last or fizzle out.” Bhuvan further illustrated the example of Dhinchak Pooja, and said that if she had the courage to respond to hate messages and a negative public attitude by just putting up another video, what stops the others from doing something more meaningful with the same kind of outlook.
Next up was a speaker from the IT industry, Madhuri Duggirala, Director, Scaled Campaign Services, Google India. With 20 years of experience under her belt, Madhuri spoke about how Hyderabad is a very viable location for growth not only in the IT segment but many other professions.
Among the singers who blew the audience away was 19-year-old Shaurya Singh from The Stage, an Indian TV talent show. Shaurya spoke about how he never believed in himself but then certain people in life changed that presumption, thereby changing his world. DJ Ritwiz, Punjabi rapper Prabh Deep and artiste manager Rahul Sinha also engaged the audience in a captivating discussion about the entertainment industry while Archana Rao spoke about the making of her design label.
After the fantastic evening wrapped up, Anto Philip and Shreyans Jain, the founders of the summit said, “The response was amazing. It was interesting to see audience ask such smart questions.
