Using Social Media for Social Good
hello everybody hello
i can’t see you guys but i know that you
are very excited all right
so uh let me make a confession
right i hate giving lectures i know one
thing about you guys you hate listening
to lectures as well
so let’s do something different let’s
have a conversation
uh all of us know that india is special
but then we are going to show you three
images and
you will understand why india is special
all right we have prepared a special
menu for you just take a moment to
read this menu and figure out what would
you like to have would you like to have
some crunchy veg
chicken chili chili chicken you want or
probably some chicken schezwan
all right this is a special menu but
don’t even think about coming to our
kitchen
and figuring out how we make this
because
our kitchen room permission not allowed
all right although our kitchen is not
visitable
our juices are so then yeah that’s about
it
so you see english is the most commonly
spoken language
all over the world and yet india has a
way of making it special
you know india is special all of us know
that india is unique
and yet when our friends from abroad
come over here and asks us
what makes india special we get stuck at
two points
cricket or bollywood but there is more
to india right
india is home to nalanda which at one
point had more than nine million books
in its library
india is also home to the samrat yantra
which is the world’s largest sundial
where you can still tell time with an
accuracy of two seconds
india has a railway network that is so
large that if you lay down the tracks in
a line
you can go around the equator more than
one and a half times
okay let’s have a show of hands how many
of you knew these facts
all right a few of you how many of you
didn’t know these facts
okay and how many of you are not going
to raise your hands no matter what i say
all right so this is the india that we
are constantly forgetting and that’s
what we are here for
we are here to remind you of this
beautiful india
hi and i am and two years ago in 2018 we
got married
and one year into our marriage we
decided to have a baby
but our baby was different our baby was
a brain child
it was an idea it was a fashion project
we wanted to discover india like never
before we wanted to roam
all over india for 200 days and make 100
videos about 100 reasons to love
india hi i’m avi and i want to give you
a reason to love
india
starting today i’ll be travelling every
day for the next 200 days
doing the one thing i love the most wow
telling stories
these are real stories that make india
special
because india is awesome and these
amazing things must reach the world
and give you me and everyone else 100
reasons to love
india so let’s go
[Music]
but why give you 100 reasons to love
india it’s because our news feeds are
becoming increasingly negative
just check your news feeds and you’ll
find negative videos negative news
everything is so negative so because our
news feeds are becoming so negative
studies actually show that you’re
actually being more depressed you’re
feeling more anxious
and you’re getting more stress apart
from this there’s another more important
problem
interacting with all of this negative
news is robbing us of our compassion
it’s something that’s called compassion
fatigue so over a period of time
you actually start to get immune to
these causes or the videos
the animals being tortured and that’s
true and we’ve observed that this
actually happens in case of india as
well
there’s so much of negative news about
india that over a period of time
you have some sort of a hatred for india
india is simply not cool yeah
and that’s what we wanted to change we
wanted to change your perception about
india
see what we realized was today’s
generation the millennials
they don’t have the time to watch a 45
minute documentary on apj abdul kalam
but that doesn’t mean that they are not
interested they are interested
and they do have three minutes so why
not present
so much data in a compressed format in a
format that people will
actually like that’s what we decided to
do
see we love to travel but we didn’t want
to travel like tourists all right
we wanted to travel with a purpose and
that’s
that became our first purpose to travel
to find stories find
interesting stories and to find
interesting stories you have to have
conversations you have to read books and
we decided to read the best possible
books ever
these books have no pages and they are
open to all
these books are called people and that’s
how we met
him
meet padmashi shivang norfolk so ladakh
is a cold mountain desert and it always
has a water problem because their source
of water is melting snow
and over the past 40 years because of
climate change these glaciers have
receded
so farmers don’t get water when they
actually need it
so padmashi chivang a civil servant had
a simple idea
to use science to solve this problem he
diverted water in winters and froze it
and collected it
in such a way that when summer months
would arrive the increasing temperatures
would cause this water to melt
and absorb in the soil and help those
farmers exactly in those villages
so these farmers who had not seen crops
like potato could actually grow it
because they had water when they needed
it padmashree chivagra stays in a very
simple house in lay
and still he’s changed the lives of
thousands of people across ladakh
but you didn’t know that and we wanted
to share his story
we met suraj so suraj
is a kid from kerala who took up farming
at the age of 13.
and people think that there is no money
in farming this guy has a farm on his
own
and he generates a lot of revenue he
changed people’s perception
we wanted to tell you his story we met
the siddhi tribe
this tribe came to india about 400 years
ago and today
they identify themselves as indians so
much so that they want to represent
india in the olympics
we met sarang he is an engineer just
like you guys he has a job
and he still feels that science can you
can be used to kill terrorism
education can be used to reach out to
those who resort to terrorism extremism
so that they have no choice
they focused on finding a solution and
that’s what makes them a hero
so throughout our videos we actually
started to share and support these
people and put forward their ideas
but not with em but not with sympathy
but with empathy
so when people asked us what they could
do for children’s day we shared ideas
about five ngos who are doing a great
job making the lives of children better
so sarang established a science park in
ladakh so we raised funds to install
a solar panel over there so that the
science park would have electricity the
year around
as our following kept growing we wanted
our audience to come across
such great people and great causes and
actually be a part of the change
so as we traveled as we traveled our
pope is evolved
our purpose became making the right
people reach the right audience in the
right kind of way
we didn’t want to lecture anybody we
just wanted to start a conversation
and that’s what we did as we traveled
all over india
what we realized was india is amazing
india is awesome it gave us a lot of
reasons to love india
but you know what’s ironic while trying
to find hundred reasons to love india we
were probably finding
1 000 reasons not to love india you know
and one of these reasons was this one
so you guys must have seen this video i
mean these videos or this image
very frequently in your whatsapp after
ganpati it’s a broken idol that has
washed ashore after visarjan
so even in a city like mumbai during the
10-day garnpati festival more than two
lakh isles are immersed in different
water bodies
and this number keeps increasing every
year because more and more people
welcome baba ho
and there’s nothing wrong in that except
that the idol is made of pop pop or
plaster of paris
when this mixes with water it turns
exothermic which means that it
increases the temperature of water which
makes it toxic for the marine creatures
apart from that all that glittery and
amazing paint that you see
is toxic it has metals like lead cadmium
mercury which mix with the water
and that becomes toxic for the fishes
and for you
this water gets into our food it gets
into salt it gets into the fishes that
we eat
and in short you and i are drinking
poison but
yeah so this is not just disrespecting
the nature
but this is also disrespecting the god
that we are worshiping
and we wanted to change that so what
happened was
in 2018 when we got married and nyati
moved into my house
she saw that even we were getting a pop
idol a proper idol with paint and
everything
and she thought hey why not go
eco-friendly
when she told me this idea i said okay
we will propose this idea to my
grandparents but then making people
change is the most difficult thing to do
but we were surprised that they were
very welcoming to the idea
they accepted the change and what we
thought was if
my grandparents who have been doing one
particular thing
in the same fashion for the last 40
years if they can change then maybe the
world can change as well
so last year in 2019 we made a three
minute video
we had one thing in mind that we are not
here to touch anybody’s beliefs
we are just here to give them options we
are just here to tell them that you guys
are not the villains
and there are a lot of options that are
available that can help you
be even more pure to your beliefs so we
made a video it was a three minute long
video
and overnight this video went viral it
got five million views on facebook
and two hundred 000 likes on instagram
it was amazing i mean
overnight people started calling us for
interviews for radio interviews and
newspapers were calling us it was
amazing
but it was more than just numbers it was
about something even better
so what happened sorry so what happened
when we uh
this video started going viral was
nothing short of a miracle
so our video basically had solutions for
the city of mumbai because both of us
stay there
we didn’t expect the video to blow up
this much but
peoples from other cities started
actually giving us their solutions
so you guys have heard of the word
crowdsourcing right when people actually
start contributing for one common
project
that’s exactly what happened here so
there were citizens from cities like
bangalore pune hyderabad who started
sharing eco-friendly idle vendors
details with us
or sharing information when the
municipality was donating eco-friendly
idols
simply because they wanted to make india
a greener place because
one of our friends had booked an
eco-friendly idol and he sorry he had
booked the pop idol and he went back and
changed it for an eco-friendly idol
after watching the video a company that
had nothing to do with manufacturing
gunpathy idols actually started making
seed ganpatis and selling them to gated
communities
just because they wanted to make the
festival more eco-friendly
our friend chinoo cleans the beaches in
dada and then in 2018 he found 200 pop
idols and in 2019 he found just 20. you
can see that in the photo
[Applause]
we are we are not here to take credit
guys because actually speaking the
credit is yours
it’s all you we were just the messengers
you know
i mean you wanted to change and we just
gave you a lot of options that this is
possible
and that’s how our pope is evolved again
our purpose became
using social media for social good
you realize that 20 30 years ago we did
not have the internet
so it was so difficult to gather support
of 100 000 people
for something that you really feel
passionately about
but today that is possible today all it
takes is a good status update and
a lot of people will come together the
people that you don’t know the people
from
outside your city even outside your
country maybe that
is possible that is the power of social
media
today any video any message can go viral
then why not choose to put out a good
message over there
so that’s what we mean by using social
media for social good
so have you done something good lately
planted a tree well i know all of us
planted trees metaphorically this
morning
but have you volunteered at an animal
shelter or done something good then put
it up on social media
i know you’ll get a lot of likes you’ll
get comments someone might even share
your work and it feels good
i know that too we put out videos every
alternate day and it feels good when
people give us a good feedback
but i’m not asking you to do it for
vanity purposes there’s actually some
psychology involved in it as well
a year professor dr laurie santos wanted
to actually study happiness as a science
and her research
gave us some very critical insights when
you share something good
and you get a reaction on it then it
actually increases your feeling of
happiness
on the other hand when you share
something negative when you get a
reaction
it doesn’t actually make you feel better
but your feelings actually deepen
so if sharing something good is going to
make you feel good why not do it
volunteer somewhere go find out what
your passion is
if you feel strongly for a cause then go
out and do something about it
and then put it up on social media
because you will be happy both on and
off social media
and you’ll actually make a difference to
the world i also want to talk about one
of our favorite creators
leonardo dicaprio you may know him as
jack from the movie titanic
but to us he’s much more leo is not just
an ordinary celebrity
he is not going to share photos of
himself on the red carpet
or playing a game or doing some random
time pass leo uses his platform on
instagram of 40.6 million followers
to only talk about his passion which is
the environment
his continuous posts on the matter keep
bringing up a lot of awareness among the
audience
whether it’s individuals or students so
people are now becoming more aware of
issues all over the world with regards
to climate change students are starting
to ask the right questions
and then all of these people are
actually taking steps that make a
difference
and that’s what we mean by using social
media for social good
when someone actually takes a step
beyond thinks about an
entity above himself and actually
manages to change the world
in the end we want to give you this
magic number
1.3 billion you know what that is
you know what that is please that’s our
population right
and every sixth person in the world
is an indian a lot of people consider
that as a problem but it doesn’t have to
be
actually it’s a great opportunity think
about it
a population without a purpose is a
problem
because people just don’t know what to
do with their lives
imagine if 1.3 billion people dedicate
their lives to anything that they love
something that they feel passionately
about it could be anything
it could be the environment the
education system
or the economy anything that you feel
passionately about if you dedicate your
lives to that
then you can definitely be a hero
because a population without a purpose
is a burden
but a population with a purpose is an
unstoppable force
and that’s the reason why i love india
thank you so much thank you so much
[Applause]