Ayera's documentary weaves together the ground-level realities of students, teachers, and grassroots stakeholders from the NGO, Round Table India.
Ayera Edie Jain
For 11th-grader Ayera Edie Jain of The Shri Ram School, Aravali, storytelling isn't just an art form-it's a tool for change. Her most recent project, a reflective documentary on educational inequality in rural India, doesn't just state facts. It makes them human.
Shot in Bithoor, Uttar Pradesh, where quality education remains an unattainable dream, Ayera's documentary weaves together the ground-level realities of students, teachers, and grassroots stakeholders from the NGO, Round Table India. With unflinching poise, she merges institutional critique with the narratives of human lives, helping viewers not just to grasp the issue but also feel it.
Her approach was immersive-through extensive interviews, she learned stories of resilience and stitched together powerful vignettes with a compassionate eye and an open heart, raising the documentary beyond reportage-it is a powerful call to action. Ayera also worked with local NGOs to make the film an effective advocacy and crowdfunding tool. "This isn't just about sharing a story," she says. "It's about building bridges between the unheard and the change-makers. Telling individuals that there is inequality is not sufficient. You must make them see it from another's perspective. That is what engenders empathy-and maybe even leads to action."
That ability to see the systems beneath the stories inspired Ayera to research another overlooked cause: household saving. In her peer-reviewed scholarly article "Social Determinants to Saving," published in The International Journal for Advanced Research, Ideas, and Innovation in Technology, Ayera combines economics, sociology and psychology to describe why families save-or don't. She contends saving behavior is as much determined by trauma and trust as income or interest rates.
"Financial choices are emotional choices," she argues. "If policy doesn't take that into consideration, it will always fall short."
While her documentary brings audiences into empty classrooms, her paper critiques conventional financial policies. Both projects are driven by a common urge to ask fundamental questions and to seek answers based on human experience. Ayera's creative expression also thrives in her poetry book, "Pretending to Lie," a collection that explores vulnerability and the fundamental search for emotional truth.
But Ayera doesn't just critique society from behind a pen and a camera. She builds change from the ground up-literally, at times. In the hills of Uttarakhand, she blended concrete and hauled stones to help build a temple from the bottom up. In a Rajasthan school library, she helped restore a neglected space to one filled with light, books, and laughter. She has chopped vegetables in a community kitchen and taught art to government school kids, making every interaction an exchange of learning. These acts, small as they may be, are a reflection of a larger belief: that change begins with engagement.
Ayera is a force to be reckoned with in so many different spaces-a national under-19 silver medalist basketball player, a published design thinker, and a fervent photographer and singer. For her recent product design project, which was published in Grade 10, she tackled problem-solving through usability and form. She also maintains a music page where she posts both covers and originals, allowing her voice to say what words cannot. She always emphasizes, "I'm not aiming for balance just for the sake of it. My goal is to experience life deeply-through movement, action, and connection."
Her power lies in doing and in feeling. Whether writing a stanza, racing to a finish line, or leading a social project, Ayera approaches each task with unshakeable conviction: every humble act of kindness has the power to cause ripples beyond itself. She isn’t waiting to venture into the adult world to create change; she is creating it now-with grit and poise, her gaze set on both the world as it is and the world as it should be. In doing so, she reminds us that today's young people are not passive witnesses to change; they are its builders, drawing on intelligence, compassion, and an unshakeable commitment to be heard.
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