ConnectUs Youth Spotlight EP 16: Inspiring teens' self-actualization through The Allusion Podcast

Woosung
6 hours ago
4 min read

In today's podcast, we featured Ihina, a class 12 student from India taking the humanities track. She runs The Allusion, a podcast to help high school students achieve the true versions of themselves through guest speakers and a newsletter/e-magazine.

When she asked her classmates what they want to do with their lives, the answer always came back the same way:

I'll see after NEET (Med school Exam). I'll see after JEE (Engineering). I'll see after UPSC (Civil Service).

"It wasn't that they didn't have dreams," she says. "They were just not surrounded by the right references."

Daily Routine

Ihina works on "The Allusion" before she leaves the house for school. After school, she returns home and puts in more work, some studying, and hit the gym or go to the pool.

"We don't have a lot around here," she says, "because this is not a huge city."

Her school is one of the old, well known ones. Once you get in on your 10th grade marks, almost everyone starts preparing for the same handful of exams.

There are three exam "tracks" that most people follow:

NEET - for medical schools

JEE - for engineering and the IITs.

UPSC - for working in the government, and public administration

Students usually start on NEET and JEE in eighth or ninth grade, studying for two or three years of preparation before the paper is even in front of them. Additionally, severe cutthroat competition and the notoriously difficult exam problems make self-studying virtually impossible, especially for students who are underresourced. Thus, many students get offered professional help at a coaching institute, where they receive guided practice materials and lectures for an enrollment fee.

When the NEET papers leaked and caused a widespread scandal in India this year, the exams had to be canceled, causing an insufferable amount of burden to students who spent half of their lives preparing for the exam. Some of her senior friends in her school were also affected. "You're giving two years preparing for that exam, so it was not fair," she told us. Those who spent their entire fortune to travel in from rural areas were the most affected.

Luckily, she tried to take a different path. For media and communications, the exams still count, but somewhere between twenty and thirty percent of the decision is what she's actually done outside of class, which gave her more free time to focus on her podcast and activities she was passionate about.

Shifting Interests

Initially, she wanted to study physics like many others, then marine biology, then psychology, with a few more stops in between, and eventually ended up in media and communications because it was the one that kept pointing back at the same thing.

"Media and communication is all about storytelling. It's all about references," she says.

She likes how much fits under it - Marketing, PR, filmmaking, management. If she had to pick a corner, she'd take sports media, since she's played cricket, basketball, table tennis, and badminton, and she thinks narration is a big part of watching sports. She's also interested in Crisis communication in PR, for the same reason.

The Allusion

Her own references came from books, podcasts, sports documentaries, and Marvel.

The show runs on two ideas. The first is references. The second is self actualization, a unique concept she explains with passion:

"If we have two selves, we have the real self, what we are right now, and we have the ideal self, what we want to be. Just imagine two circles, and they are intersecting. The gap between that is the anxiety. If there's a huge gap, huge anxiety, that means you are just not taking action to reach your full potential."

She's clear that this isn't only a matter of trying harder; self actualization sits at the top of Maslow's pyramid, and you don't get there without going through the layers underneath it.

"If you want to self actualize, one thing you have to do is have an environment where you feel love, where you feel safe, where you can pursue all your passions."

Some episodes are her alone, walking through the idea and what to do about it, while others bring guest speakers. One recent guest was Kashika Kumar, founder of Q Studios, who talked about how fandoms shape ordinary life, echoing Ihina's point. According to Ihina, the references are already in your hobbies and in what you watch, but the main obstacle is simply not noticing them.

Handling challenges

"I just felt like The Allusion is going to fail," she says.

So the first thing she did was build a team, mostly so there were other people in it with her. She thinks that's where most people stall, on the assumption that they'll be judged, or that nobody's going to listen anyway.

Her advice is less about confidence than about scheduling.

"Take action. Don't just talk about it. Make a plan, set goals, and then deadlines, and actually achieve it," she says. Once a deadline exists, the thing stops being an idea.

She keeps a pad where she writes her goals down. She tells that it's about neuroplasticity, that the brain takes the written thing more seriously than the thought. Either way, the pad works and costs nothing, which, given there's no budget and no professional team behind you, is what matters.

In the future, she hopes a travel app built for third world countries, and finding a way to help women chase their own ambitions and has many other goals, striving for the ultimate "self-actualization" that she seeks to promote in the podcast.

We hope you enjoy this episode of the ConnectUs Youth Spotlight, available on Spotify and across our social media platforms.