This week in Chandigarh, the Mayor of Chandigarh, Shri Saurabh Joshi, conferred the GYPF Youth Leadership Award 2026 on me at the 19th Global Youth Peace Fest. I am grateful, and I am also careful about it, because a youth leadership award given to an adult raises a fair question: whose leadership is really being honoured?
In this piece, I explain what the recognition is, why I am treating it as a responsibility more than a celebration, and what I believe any youth leadership award should truly reward. If you lead, teach or mentor young people, or if you are young and wondering whether recognition matters, I hope it gives you a different way to think about it.
The GYPF Youth Leadership Award 2026, in brief
The Global Youth Peace Fest is an annual gathering organised by Yuvsatta (Youth for Peace). For nearly two decades it has brought young leaders, educators and peacebuilders from across the world to Chandigarh. This year’s 19th edition ran from 30 September to 2 October 2026 under the theme Youth Leading Change, and it closed on Gandhi Jayanti, the International Day of Non-Violence.
The award was conferred by Shri Saurabh Joshi, who was elected Mayor of Chandigarh in January 2026. It recognises my work with young people as a coach, a mentor and the founder of YUVA, a youth organisation working across Mauritius and India.
My role at this year’s festival included mentoring the GYPF 2026 and GGDSD Youth Changemaker Internship. It is a 60-hour academic programme in which college students turn their experience of the festival into supervised community action. It also included speaking to the student volunteers at their orientation, which I reflected on in my GGDSD College talk.
The paradox inside every youth leadership award
There is a quiet contradiction in many youth leadership awards: adults often judge them, and adults often receive them.
That is not wrong in itself. Mentors, teachers and organisers matter. But it can reinforce a habit I described in my International Youth Day message as future-tensing: speaking to young people in the future tense, so that we never have to take them seriously in the present. We call them tomorrow’s leaders and then wait for tomorrow to arrive.
So the honest question for anyone who receives an award like this is not “Did I lead well?” It is: “Did my work move young people out of the future tense and into the present one?”
That is the only standard by which I would want this award judged.
What recognition does to the mind
Recognition feels wonderful, and that is exactly why it needs handling with care.
Psychologists have long studied the overjustification effect, in which an external reward attached to something we once did for its own sake slowly crowds out the original motive. A large meta-analysis by Deci, Koestner and Ryan found that expected, tangible rewards tended to undermine intrinsic motivation. Unexpected rewards and genuine positive feedback did not show the same harmful pattern.
An award you did not seek is therefore not the danger. The danger is what can happen next: you begin, almost without noticing, to work for the next one. The audience changes, from the young person in front of you to an imagined panel behind them.
I have written before about the applause gap, the hollowness that grows when being celebrated outpaces being known. Awards widen that gap if we let them. They narrow it only when we use them to go back to the work rather than away from it.
What this award means to me
I have tried to name honestly what this recognition means. It comes down to three things.
It is a receipt, not a trophy. A youth leadership award records something young people have already given. They gave their attention, their trust and their willingness to try. The certificate carries my name, but the substance belongs to them.
It is shared. I work as a Mauritian across India, and none of this work happens alone. Recognition in Chandigarh belongs equally to YUVA’s volunteers, to the organisers at Yuvsatta, and to every young person who has given their time to the work, often unseen and unpaid. If anything, this award reminds me how much of that labour is never recognised at all.
It is a commitment. The students I mentored this week carry their community action on HIV awareness and girls’ rights through the rest of October. The award will mean something only if that work outlives the ceremony. A recognition that ends at the stage is a decoration. One that sends you back to the community is a contract.
A youth leadership award given to an adult is not a trophy. It is a promissory note, signed in front of young people, that the work they inspired will continue when the hall is empty.
A moment to pause
If you lead, mentor or teach young people, it is worth asking yourself a few private questions:
- When young people talk about your work, do they describe what you did, or what they discovered they could do?
- Which of your efforts would you continue even if no one ever recognised them?
- Who around you is doing the quieter, unrecognised half of the work you are praised for?
What a youth leadership award should really recognise
If you run, judge or nominate for a youth leadership award, I would suggest weighing four things above visibility.
Transfer of agency. Did the nominee hand responsibility to young people, or keep the microphone? The strongest youth leaders make themselves gradually less necessary.
Presence after the stage. Look for follow-through measured in months, not moments. Mentoring, accountability and support after the event matter more than the event itself.
Who gets invited in. Recognise people who open doors for those rarely asked: girls who are kept out of public life, young people in rural areas, and those living with stigma.
Partnership, not patronage. The UN Security Council’s Resolution 2250 on youth, peace and security, adopted in 2015, recognised young people as active contributors to peace. Awards should honour the adults who treat them that way.
With gratitude
My sincere thanks go to the Mayor of Chandigarh, Shri Saurabh Joshi, for conferring the award. I also thank Pramod Sharma, Founder and Coordinator of Yuvsatta, and his team for nineteen years of building the Global Youth Peace Fest, as well as GGDSD College for hosting the internship. Above all, I thank the young delegates and volunteers who made this week what it was.
The truest measure of this award will not be found on a shelf. It will be found in October, in a community conversation about HIV that someone finally had the courage to start, or in a girl who stays in school because a classmate refused to stay silent. If that happens, the award was theirs all along.
If you are a young professional working out how to turn early recognition, or the lack of it, into a clear direction, my Career & Growth Coaching is built for exactly that conversation.
