5 May 2020, 12:00 PM

“ 3… 2… 1…publish it!”
That was the inauguration of OUR NOT-SO-SECRET DIARY just a few weeks ago. When our IGCSE board exams got cancelled, who would have thought that two months later we would be doing something other than binging Netflix? But you see, we soon realised, to move ahead (from boredom) we had to look forward into the future.

When we met a few years ago, we found that we have very different outlooks towards school. While one of us is carefree and is usually stress-free, the other plans ahead of time and is extremely hardworking. However, we believe that opposites attract so it only made sense that the two of us would not only become the best of friends but would also find a way to express our different opinions for the welfare of others. So here we are, two extremely loquacious people who have just started to share our not-so-secret diary, containing our outlooks on many facets of student life, with the world.

At many points in the past, we found ourselves wishing for someone approachable that we could go to for advice. Many of our friends and classmates instantly turned to their older siblings for that kind of advice as they had been in exactly the same shoes in the past. As older siblings ourselves, we have given guidance to our juniors, but we felt like we could expand that circle, to provide help and entertainment to more. The circuit- breaker gave us a chance to realise that we could do just that. At first, we thought that a blog would be the best way for us to go but then we decided to do something a bit more innovative. Innovation, to us, means doing something not just for self- development but also for the betterment of other members of the community. It also means doing something that has never been done before, but desperately needs to be done. We think that innovation ties closely with creativity. The difference, however, is that when you are using your creativity to innovate something, you are not only providing the community what it needs but you are also having fun yourself! Therefore we decided to ditch the blog and start something more versatile and enjoyable: a podcast!

We believe that a podcast acts like a recorded phone call that anyone and everyone can hear at their convenience. It also provides a special human connection that is important when giving any advice. While anyone could just google their problems and get innumerable results, the written words of a stranger on the internet might not hold as much weight as the spoken words of two fellow students who might have gone through the same. Since we don’t consider ourselves the most adept writers, a podcast is a perfect way for us to express ourselves. Thus we feel that our voiced opinions can help the NPS student body overcome obstacles and start looking forward to enjoying their school experiences. We hope that this podcast expands the sphere of influence of NPS on the internet by tackling yet another form of media.

We will continue to look forward into the future by documenting all that we will learn in our final 2 years of our school journey and putting it on the internet so that it is available to anyone who needs it. Through the chapters, we too are getting a chance to reflect on our past 2 years and understand where we could have done better so that we can make amends in the future. We hope to be older siblings to those, who don’t have any, and be approachable enough that they can ask us anything and everything they want to. We also hope to make this podcast a tradition that we leave behind at NPS on which students continue to record their school lives.

To the readers, we say, we know that your journey through school (mainly high school), will have been fraught with obstacles and that there have been times when you feel like things are really not going in your favour, but remember, that you have to keep looking forward with the knowledge that the bad times are eventually going to pass. Trust us when we say that you will probably end up laughing about it a few years later. And don’t ever feel like you are alone because now you have your 2 older sisters to help you out every step of the way! After all, this is the whole reason we turned our secret diary into Our Not-So-Secret Diary.

By Varuni Bhatnagar and Samruddhi Lele