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Childhood Interrupted
How can we restore the loss to children from the pandemic?
Speakers
A discussion that looks at the impact of the pandemic on children, especially between ages 8 to 18.
How have the various restrictions imposed affected their routines, their mental make-up? How will it affect their future? Will this become the lost generation?
What can we do to prevent it, both at the level of the individual child, and society as a whole? What has been done before, in different parts of the world, when children have been under collective stress, through wars and disease?
The goal of this diverse panel of stake holders, would be to let be truly understand the impact on children, but also learn from past history – say through other experienced pandemics, or the last World War, how societies tried to mitigate the impact on young people. And therefore feel inspired to innovate our way out of the current situation, when it comes to the future citizens of the country.
Speakers

Shekhar Seshadri
Dr Shekhar Seshadri is a graduate of Maulana Azad Medical College, Delhi and a postgraduate in Psychiatry from National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro Sciences (NIMHANS), Bangalore. He is currently Senior Professor, Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Associate Dean of Behavioural Sciences (NIMHANS), Bangalore. Besides working with child and adolescent mental health including developmental disabilities, he is actively involved in the areas of gender and sexualities, violence/trauma and abuse, children in difficult circumstances, juvenile justice, experiential methodologies, school programmes/teacher training in life skills education,Community and school mental health programmes, forum theatre and qualitative research.
Some resources:

Kavita Gupta
Kavita has worked in diverse fields of scientific research, corporate restructuring, finance and now education. Her interests include reading on education, brain development, History and India.
She is a science post graduate from Bombay University, and an alumnus of Harvard Business School. She founded and heads Neev Schools and Neev Academy, aspires to spend more time with Neev children through her love of history, literature and connect children and teachers with strong school practices meeting the needs of Today’s child. Education has had an unparalleled value in Kavita’s family – with many generations before her being educators, including her father who was a lecturer at BITS Pilani before starting Lupin.

Deepika Mogilishetty

Vishal Talreja
Vishal Talreja comes with deep grassroots level experience of working with children and young people for over 15 years.
He has co-founded, along with 11 others, Dream a Dream, a charity which empowers young people from vulnerable backgrounds to overcome adversity and flourish. He is an Ashoka Fellow, an Eisenhower Fellow, and a Board Member at PYE Global.
Vishal has been recognized as an “Architect of the Future” by the Waldzell Institut, Austria. He is also an advisor and mentor to start-up NGOs and young social entrepreneurs. He is a TEDx Speaker, an active writer on development challenges and human-interest stories, and a poet. In 2018, he was awarded the “Heroes of Bengaluru” award.A passionate dreamer and believer in the inherent potential of each child, Vishal is a bundle of infectious energy.

Rohini Nilekani
Rohini Nilekani is Founder-Chairperson, Arghyam, a foundation she endowed to fund initiatives for sustainable water and sanitation across India. From 2004 to 2014, she was Founder-Chairperson of Pratham Books, a non-profit children’s publisher. She is Co-founder-Director of EkStep, a non-profit education platform.
A former journalist writing for leading publications, she is also the author of “Stillborn” and “Uncommon Ground”, both published by Penguin Books India. In 2017, she was inducted as Foreign Honorary Member of the AmericanAcademy of Arts and Sciences.
As signatories of the Giving Pledge, Rohini and Nandan Nilekani have committed half their wealth to philanthropy.