The year is 2016 “climate change is real” says Leonardo DiCaprio on the dais where he had just received his first and only Oscar so far. In 2018 “ climate change is an existential crisis” says 15 year old environmental activist Greta Thunberg at a TEDx talk event at Stockholm. At the event of receiving his first Oscar award after having been an undeniably exceptional actor for more than four decades, Leo decided to use the opportunity he had, to spread awareness about climate change rather than talk about his struggles to achieve an Oscar “Climate change is real; it is happening right now. It is the most urgent threat facing our entire species, and we need to work collectively together and stop procrastinating, let us not take this planet for granted” he said and by having done so he had managed to get the point across to millions of people and spread awareness about it and induce a feeling of urgency in the minds of the people to start doing something about climate change. Fast forward to 2018, we have Greta Thunberg, diagnosed with depression and selective mutism at the age of 11, talking incessantly and choosing to do so about climate change because according to her, this is the only thing worth talking about and should be the main concern of every single individual alive on the planet.
—
For techkshetra 2019, gratefully enough, “ climate change” has been chosen as the theme and nothing could be more relevant or important than that. Because climate change “is” real and “is” an environmental crisis. How do we know? Just take a moment and look around. Need statistics?… seventeen of the warmest years have occurred since 2000, with 2016 being the highest, 11% of the worlds population is currently vulnerable to climate change impacts such as droughts, floods, heat waves extreme weather events and sea-level rise, nearly 1 million hectares of coastal ecosystem destroyed by human activities and the list goes on and on. By choosing “climate change” as the theme for an event like this tech fest, a university like ours with quite an amount of human population in it specifically the “youth” which is the major part of it, we can actually get out and do something about it, we can manage to spread awareness among people, among our fellow students and among the hundreds of students who are going to be coming from other colleges who can manage to spread the word in their colleges and so on and so forth. And hopefully by the end of the event, the simple act of having chosen this as the theme for a simple event like techkshetra, our college could contribute to an amazing cause and help make the world a better place for the future generations.
