Way back in 1997 still a college kid I organised my first Interschool event called Activity, the idea of the event was to give a cool platform for students to participate. Over the years this event was renamed Wizkids more popularly known as Horlicks Wizkids. For over 20 years of my life, I have been traveling across South Asia hosting and organising this event. The event was held across 30 to 40 cities every year an over a million students participated in singing, speaking, dance, writing, art, literary, and all kinds of competitions. I can safely claim to have witnessed more kids performing than most people can imagine. Wizkids was not the only event we organised – Spell Bee, Pogo Amazing Kids, Financial Quest, Dell Champs, Pogo Funtakshari are among the 1000 odd student events we organised over the years.

While we have been very successful in organising school events and allowing children to participate. One challenge that we have always faced was the attitude of schools towards events, they mostly prioritize academics over extra-curricular activities. We are living through an event of a lifetime, the lockdown due to the COVID situation. All schools have moved their learning online and learning for them still means academic subjects. Online education means academic learning and we somehow cannot seem to think of anything beyond that. The sad reality is that today despite all the talk about overall development the priority of most schools remains academics.