I had always been fascinated by stories that took me to unknown, faraway lands. Stories with characters very different from me and my surroundings. You can say it was a good escape, and as a child, I loved my escapes into these wonderlands and neverlands. It was common to find me looking for hidden alleys and secret doors while I visited our family home. I would collect all the trash (like lanterns that were no longer in use), and when anyone asked, I would say I am taking them with me as I need them for my story.

You must have guessed it by now; I had been a hardcore fiction fan. I just loved immersing myself into stories and forgetting everything around me. It always felt like time slowed down whenever I was reading. I could touch, smell, feel everything the protagonists touched, smelt and felt. It was as if I could live many diverse lives with my books. Ah! The good old childhood days….and I wish I could be Peter Pan! Well, in some ways, I still am. At least, a part of me is.

You know what’s funny? Writing is everywhere. On the back of the cereal box, inside our favorite game, in movie credits, even the ingredients list on a can of soda – someone wrote that. Every tweet, manual, meme, podcast script, comic strip someone wrote that too. Ah! I know with the advent of GPT you will now say, “prompted not written”. So let’s change the narrative if that makes any sense in the current scenario, every written word we read, someone actually thought of that. That’s why it’s out there. It’s the power of thoughts we are pursuing and writing is one of the mediums to sharpen it.

Well, I am old school and still consider writing sacred. For me, writing is the quiet thread running through everything we consume. And if we pause to realise that we could be writing the very things we consume, it’s powerful. That’s when perspective shifts. That’s when we begin to think.

At RIEDU, we take writing pretty seriously. As mentioned earlier, writing is synonymous to thinking. Think about it, if we stop thinking for ourselves, we leave the door open for others and that others include people, algorithms, systems, or noise to think in our place. It might be a scary thought, but in an AI world, we can pretty easily hand over our power to systems that weren’t built with ‘us’ in mind.

If we don’t write, we don’t reflect. If we don’t reflect, we don’t question and we don’t grow. And when we stop growing, we leave the thinking to algorithms. Writing today has become a quiet rebellion, a way to maintain our humanness. We’re not just raising good writers; we’re raising thinking, feeling, curious beings. That’s a revolution.

If you ask me, in all honesty I would say that we do not run any writing programs at RIEDU. That’s the selling point for the world. We believe anyone and everyone can write. We believe in the therapeutic effect of writing and we trust our children. Thus, we encourage writing from the heart, by following one’s curiosity. Every year, we are eager to look at the world from the perspective of our amazing Young Editors.

Come June and we have our annual global summer writing program at RIEDU by the name – Young Editors Program 2025. It is five years old now, and every year it’s renewed and reiterated since we first launched it in 2020, right in the heart of the pandemic. #TBH we are the facilitators, nurturers, and equal learners in the process. The energy of the group dictates us. It is a reminder of the child in us all. We come, write, learn, play silly basically, it’s fun and a place to be! When I said, place to be, I meant, place to BE YOURSELF.

YEP 2025 has been a fulfilling experience every year, yet this year it was nothing less than magical. The camaraderie, playful banter, vibe checks, inclusive space, and writing sprints helped our #YoungEditors blossom like flowers in full bloom. For the first time, we used, misused, and thoroughly abused the filters provided by Google Meet. #TBH, I was awareded the ‘Crazy Filter Lady’ during the graduation ceremony. Our Sessions were super fun and passionate, at times followed by insane laughing riot. I wish the world could experience just one of our sessions; they’d see how much imagination, hope, faith, honesty, joy and creative spirit our young editors hold.

This is exactly what I had always envisioned. A space that honors the curiosity and questions of young thinkers with equal elan.Where each one of us can giggle mid-sentence, speak our mind, tell our truth, share our story, feel heard and valued. A space where writing stories isn’t an assignment but an adventure. A space where we create our own universe. This is RIEDU. This is my kinda space where you’re met with warmth, held with love, and accepted just as you are.