New Delhi: Bollywood star Bhumi Pednekar is successfully running her social media advocacy platform Climate Warrior that aims to educate people about climate change and during the second wave of the COVID-19 crisis in India. She also launched an initiative COVID Warrior that has saved many lives across India.
On World Environment Day, Bhumi Pednekar opened up on her mission to save the planet through awareness.
On the threat of climate change, Bhumi Pednekar said, "I feel that every part of me even the person I am today is a complete sum of all my life experiences, and most of them come from what I have seen at home. I remember when we were children and I was in school and our country was hit by a natural calamity our parents would send us for drives to collect donations so that we could give back to the people affected. So, I have seen this from a very young age. I have seen my father always go out and help his community and I have seen my mother show extreme compassion towards people around her. So, I think this is something that came naturally to me from them and I feel that's so important. I feel that everything we see in our childhood is what we practice in our adult life and I am thankful to my parents for opening up this world to me.
She also addressed being the most 'woke' celebrity in Bollywood. "I think being woke is about putting your opinion and standing by it for the betterment of society. I feel it's a double-edged sword because at times being woke can also have a lot of backlash. More often than not I feel like you need to have a certain amount of confidence to step out and put the thoughts you believe in out there but it needs to come from a place of responsibility and from a place of knowledge. I think that’s very important especially when you are a person who is in a place of influence and there are many that follow you, your voice is your biggest tool and you can’t use it loosely. As we say that with great power comes great responsibility, and especially for influencers this statement is like the truest," she added.
"My goal as a climate warrior this year is genuinely to see people take action on planet conscious behaviour. I think for me all of 2021 is only going to be about hammering better habits, about hammering and making sure that people actually do something about everything that we have been speaking about right from less consumption of single-use plastics to making sure that individually we all reduce our carbon footprint. I really hope that our world opens up to a certain extent so that we can do a certain amount of groundwork as well. But what will honestly make me happy is that 10 years from today everything that we and the entire community have been fighting for, to at least see some amount of change. We do see that there is a lot more replantation than deforestation. I really hope that the amount of compassion that we show to different species is a lot more and 10 years from today I want to look back and be like “Oh Wow! We are happily coexisting with all those millions of species that rightfully share this planet with us.” I really hope there’s a beautiful balance between development and conserving our nature. I really hope that we live in a world that doesn’t abuse all the natural resources that our beautiful planet gives us. We live in a world that gives us so much and individually everybody has enough compassion and care to understand that the four walls we live in isn’t our real home, this planet is our real home and there’s no planet B and we have to conserve it for it to be beautiful and abundant again," Bhumi Pednekar said on her goal as a climate warrior.
