Why TEDxThaltej Youth Had to Happen — And Why It’s Happening Fast

By Vinchy Makwana, Director of Production & TEDxThaltej Youth Reporter

You know that feeling when something just has to be done — not out of pressure, not out of trend — but because not doing it would feel like letting something important go? That’s exactly how TEDxThaltej Youth started.

It didn’t begin as a task, or even a project. It began as a question: What if we stopped waiting to be invited to spaces of change, and just built one ourselves?
And we did.

As a team of students, what we lacked in experience, we made up for in clarity. We didn’t want another “youth event.” We wanted to build something real. Something that carried weight. Something that made people sit up and say, “Wait — students did this?”

And yes, we’re moving fast. But that’s because we’ve waited long enough. For spaces that take student voices seriously. For platforms that don’t just talk about the future of education but actually look like what that future could be.

TEDxThaltej Youth isn’t about doing things for the sake of it. We’re not chasing a date or a deadline. We’re chasing a standard. That’s why we got ISO certified — not for the badge, but to build a system we can believe in. One that holds us accountable to our ideas and the way we execute them.

We’ve built everything from the ground up. Policies. Planning charts. Speaker reviews. Outreach programs. Even our letterheads are verified. We’ve said no to paper and yes to systems. No to hype and yes to habit.

People ask us, “How did you move this fast?”
The answer is simple: we didn’t waste time second-guessing what we knew had to be done.

This isn’t just an event. It’s a movement of preparation. A response to the hunger so many of us feel — to finally see something that reflects who we are, what we think, and what we know the world needs next.

TEDxThaltej Youth had to happen.
And it had to happen now.