While most girls her age were busy Snapchatting and idolising teen divas Kylie Jenner and Miley Cyrus, 10-year-old Siya Tayal was distributing bottles of cold water to the guards and labourers working under the hot Gurgaon sun.
Her idol, she says, is Suzy Becker. Suzy who, you ask, as you scrunch up your nose. “She helped save more than 850 lives by putting up a lemonade stall and sending the proceeds to UNICEF when she was just a little girl,” chirps in Siya, a resident of Gurgaon’s Regency Park 2.
“We also set out bowls of clean drinking water for stray dogs outside the DLF Phase 4 City Club and at the Galleria Market,” Siya says.
“A few friends in the apartment and I started collecting scraps of fabric and making reusable bags out of them. That was how Bee Nifty was born,” she says. The girls recently put up their Bee Nifty stalls at a Regency Park fair and used the money to feed stray dogs and support a school for autistic children called Shraddha in Mumbai.
“Being nifty means being particularly good at something, and that’s my aim. I want to be good at making the world a better place,” Siya says.
She is currently gearing up for an event this weekend at the Shri Ram School, Aravali, where she is putting up a stall with her friends, Aarushi Gupta and Rhea Datta, to sell eco-friendly bags and scrapbooks made of waste paper. Her principal and teachers are also helping her make the “waste paper collection” drive a hit.
But behind this agent of social change is a schoolkid who loves watching Tom & Jerry, dreams of becoming a gynaecologist and loves playing with her pet cats Sara and Sean.
Sitting in Siya’s 400-book-strong library, filled with her favourite authors — Roald Dahl, Lincoln Peirce, James Patterson, Dan Gutman and David Walliams — Siya’s mom, Dali, talks to us about her little “treadmill with no stop button”. “Siya is enthusiastic, creative, diligent and completely self-motivated,” Dali says. “It takes a lot to bring about change, especially in a constantly evolving place like Gurgaon. It’s amazing how such a young girl knows how to take each day as it comes.”
Siya has a twinkle in her eye as she hears her mother speak. “If we want to make this world a better place, we must start by being kind to our planet. If we think about the environment today, it will be kind to us tomorrow,” Sia says. “A few small deeds add up to make a big change. So don’t just sit there, go out and do something. It will all add up someday.”
