Siya Tayal is 15 and she knows she is enough. The Class X student from Gurugram has launched a campaign — Project I am Enough — through which she aims to dispel notions about ‘the perfect body’; the online campaign fights against body shaming in a creative way.
“In this day and age when airbrush is normal, it is indeed difficult to say ‘I am Enough’. I just want to tell everyone, particularly young girls and boys, that they are fine just the way they are,” she says, adding, “It is about time we started talking more about body positivity. Every one of us has faced it some time. If you think girls alone face body shaming, you are wrong. Boys face it too.”
Siya has beeen nominated for the 2020 Kurt Hahn Prize, awarded in recognition of an act of service to within or outside the school community among Round Square Schools (an international network of schools). Body shaming, says Siya, happens on the online space as well where people are often attacked viciously on the basis of how they look or what they wear.
Siya was barely seven years old when she founded her organisation Bee Nifty, the agency under which she carries out social initiatives like ‘My Own Bag’, which employs rural women from Haryana to make recyclable bags. She has three women who make the bags now, and she hopes to get more women into the fray. Siya even got a chance to speak about the initiative at the United Nations office in Geneva, Switzerland, in 2019. She is also a youth ambassador of the 1M2030 (one million youth leaders beyond 2030), an initiative by the United Nations Institute for Training and Research to empower youth to become changemakers; Siya is also an educator for sustainable development.
A student of Shri Ram School, Gurugram, Siya makes time for her social work amid her studies; her Class X board exam is scheduled for May 2021. “If you love something, you will always find time for it,” she says.Siya loves basket ball, dancing and singing. She is a pianist as well and loves playing football, too. She hopes she can inspire other children her age to get into the habit of giving. “We can all do something good for others. We are all capable of it,” she signs off.
Check out @SiyaTayal on Twitter or @project.i.am.enough on Instagram.
