Brishti Chanda looks older than she actually is. At 19, standing just over five feet tall, she speaks with pauses, carefully weighing every word before she utters them. One can see her considering the impact of her words, and one can also see how deeply she cares about her work. These are qualities that she shares with people such as 15-year-old Harshini Dhara from Hyderabad and 17-year-old Vidit Baya from Udaipur, as well as the one of the best-known teenagers in the world today, 16-year-old Greta Thunberg.
Greta, Brishti, Harshini and Vidit are only four of thousands of young people across the world protesting government action on the climate crisis. They are part of various transnational activism movements like Fridays For Future (FFF), Climate Strike and Extinction Rebellion (XR).
The potency of her fear is striking. Tragically, the terror of an inhospitable world and an uninhabitable future is built into the minds of this generation, it would seem.
The twin phenomena of ‘climate panic’ and ‘climate anxiety’ are increasingly being recognized as real, as the barrage of op-eds will tell us, but Brishti Chanda, the Gen Z girl, felt them acutely at an age when us millennials were barely even aware of the term. “I’ve been scared about it since fifth or sixth grade,” says the college-goer. “My nickname at school was ‘Miss Global Warming’, because I was so afraid that I would literally run out of the class crying when our Environmental Science teacher started teaching us about it. I literally tore out the pages from my book. I wish I was making this up!” she adds, with an embarrassed laugh.
The potency of her fear is striking. Tragically, the terror of an inhospitable world and an uninhabitable future is built into the minds of this generation, it would seem.
After she passed out of school in 2018, when alarm bells about an irreversible climate crisis had begun ringing loud and clear, she found out about Greta’s movement and started reading up on it. “That’s when I decided to join,” she says. “It became about not running away from my fears anymore. I watched the movie 2012 again, and I told myself, ‘This might happen. But we must fight this. There is no point in sitting and waiting for our deaths to come.’”
Brishti Chanda is now part of an umbrella group that calls itself Climate Strike, made up of members of Fridays For Future or FFF West Bengal and XR Kolkata. “In early 2019, I came across Zel Whiting from Adelaide, Australia,” recalls she, referring to a thirteen-year-old climate activist whose family has lived in India for many years. He introduced Brishti to veteran activists such as Kaajal Maheshwari, an activist from Hyderabad and co-founder of Hyderabad Rising, and Bhavreen Kandhari from Delhi. “Unlike many people from Western countries, Zel understood the needs of India as a developing country. He has been working here from mid-2018. He put me in touch with Janine O’Keefe, a climate activist who works with FFF internationally. We had a talk and then we decided to start FFF West Bengal as a separate initiative, focusing on systemic transformation rather than individual change.”