Meet The 17-Year-Old Activist Empowering Indian Teens

Seventeen-year-old Gurnoor Suri began her activist journey at the young age of 7 when she began donating her belongings to an orphanage she stumbled upon on her way back home from school. “It felt so fulfilling to visit the children, talk to them, and bring them essentials,” she told the FBomb. “I didn’t truly know the meaning of social activism and community service, but I knew that the world could be better and I believed that I could be at the forefront of that metamorphosis,” Suri added.

In the years after that early experience, Suri has worked on other various activist campaigns as an organizer and manager, generally involving advocating for women’s health in the rural parts of Indian states Punjab and Haryana.

In 2019, Suri learned about the organization Buland Udaan, which educates Indian youth in matters such as child marriage, forced labor, exploitation, and sexual health and well-being, and asked to join the organization. Suri approached Anju Verma, the founder of the NGO, to get involved, then began shadowing Verma and working as her intern.

“I gained a lot of knowledge, wisdom, and experience under her guidance for a whole year,” Suri said, noting that she organized and oversaw a campaign to educate Indians from all over the subcontinent about menstrual hygiene. Suri led a team that constructed a guide that explains menstrual and reproductive health completely in Hindi to help make that information more widely accessible.

“Women’s rights and their health care is something so deeply personal to every woman, yet so widely politicized,” Suri told the FBomb. “I am well acquainted with the struggles of being a young woman in the 21st century, and sometimes bringing them to the podium at the smallest level can be a behemoth task.”

In January 2021, Suri launched her very own initiative called Pabandi, which aims to achieve “universal empowerment” by “demystifying it and helping the society understand the significance of it in a pragmatic manner.”

As the first activist and feminist in her family, Suri admits that the labor of educating others is difficult, but she doesn’t let it obstruct her tenacity and belief in the causes she fights for.

“I believe every woman is an activist in her own right, constantly defying encultured norms at levels varying from schools, homes, offices, even farms,” she told the FBomb. Suri stresses the fact that change starts small and, when fueled by resilience, can grow into a wildfire of radical change. “We can’t ignore the implications of sexism in our everyday lives,” she stressed.

Suri is now working on launching a podcast that ties her activism to the fabric of Indian society by hosting guests who have worked on the ground and can highlight their struggles and subsequent respites. Suri vehemently believes her activism has lengthy roads to traipse and boasts an unshakable grit toward pursuing it full time after her graduation.