Jamshed was a 17-year-old and the only son of a horse trainer in the small town of Badin, Sindh. He would go to stables and racetracks, visit farms and train horses alongside his father.

As a result of his active involvement in his father’s profession, he was an average student academically. His parents were satisfied with both his academic performance and his personal interests.

One day at school, he was asked to write a paper about what he wanted to be when he grew up, as a final project for a course. Jamshed wrote a seven-page paper describing his goal of owning a horse ranch. He wrote about his dream in detail and even drew a diagram of a 200-acre ranch, including all the things he wanted, such as buildings, a track, etc. He drew a detailed floor plan for everything he dreamed of owning one day.

The next day, he handed in the project. He was excited and expected to get an A+. After two days, he received his paper back with a ‘C’ grade on top of it. On top of that, his teacher asked him to meet her after class.

Jamshed went to meet the teacher and asked, “Why did I get a ‘C’?”

“This dream is too unrealistic. You need lots of money to buy land, pay for horses and manage everything. Think of something realistic or doable,” she said.

That day, Jamshed went home and thought a lot about it. He considered his choices, his options and all possible routes. When he could not decide, he went to his father and asked him what he should do.

After listening, his father replied, “Dear son, this is completely your decision. When I was growing up, my parents gave me full freedom to choose my path. So now, I want to give my child the same freedom to dream as big as he wants, because no dream is impossible.”

After a week, Jamshed made a decision and submitted the same paper again, without making any changes. Along with it, he wrote, “You can keep the ‘C’, and I will keep my dream.” The teacher said nothing, but smiled.

Eight years later, the same teacher went on a field trip with 30 students to camp at a famous and well-established ranch. As they walked in, they saw that the ranch was even bigger than they had heard, with spacious buildings, a proper racing track and a big house on the one side. Everyone was amazed and excited to meet the owner.

When the owner came out, to the teacher’s surprise, it was Jamshed.

She immediately recognised him as the boy she had once given a ‘C’, as Jamshed hadn’t changed much except for his more mature features.

As she looked at Jamshed and the ranch around her, she realised the impact of her words back then, not just on him but on many other children.

Before leaving, she approached him and said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t understand your dream. It is ambition that makes things achievable, no matter how unrealistic they may seem.”

Jamshed, who had never held a grudge, smiled and accepted her apology. Realising that he had unknowingly inspired so many students to dream big, he felt he had truly accomplished something meaningful.

Published in Dawn, Young World, April 18th, 2026

Here is something worth thin­king about this Earth Day.

Earth is not asking for your help. It doesn’t send emails or text messages. Neither does it hold protests. It sends signals. Warnings. And you know what these are? Melting ice, rising seas, dying coral, seasons that don’t behave the way they used to.

We are not destroying Earth. We are destroying what makes it liveable — the air, the water, the weather patterns, and everything related to it. The planet itself will be fine. It has always been fine. Yes, Earth has survived things we can’t even imagine. It survived volcanoes, it saw a time when the oceans simply ran out of oxygen and most things living in them suffocated. Then there was the asteroid, the size of a small city, that hit Earth at full speed, wiping out the dinosaurs and most of everything else. Earth saw it and bore it. Five times, almost everything died. Five times, the planet kept going.

We are not the worst thing that has ever happened to this planet. But we might be the worst thing that has happened to ourselves.

The planet has survived far worse than us. The real question is: will we survive ourselves?

The secret agreement

Our atmosphere has always had normal and necessary levels of carbon dioxide in it that act like a blanket around the Earth. This blanket holds heat from the sun to keep the planet warm enough to live on.

So humans lived, cultivated, farmed, built, and dumped smoke, gas, and other pollutants into the Earth’s atmosphere. All of this was absorbed; the atmosphere kept the air safe and the weather stable.

But when the Industrial Revolution took place, things didn’t remain the same. The atmosphere was affected beyond anyone’s expectation. People started burning coal in enormous amounts to power factories, trains, and machines. More burning meant more carbon dioxide. More carbon dioxide meant a thicker blanket. A thicker blanket meant more heat getting trapped, resulting in the planet getting warmer. This is called the greenhouse effect.

To understand it better, let’s take the example of a car. If it is parked under the sun with the windows closed, the interior of the car will get extremely hot because the glass lets in the heat, but there is no way for it to escape. Carbon dioxide is doing the same thing to the entire planet.

That’s the science of what happened. A gas that was always there in safe amounts suddenly started building up faster than nature could balance it out.

What is actually happening

So now, Earth’s overall temperature has changed from what it used to be and is becoming warmer. Therefore, the oceans are warmer too, and this has directly impacted coral reefs.

Corals are dying

Coral reefs are beautiful, colourful ecosystems in the oceans, with a number of living organisms sheltering within them while fish swim around. About a quarter of all marine life lives in coral reefs.

But corals are delicate in one specific way: temperature. If the temperature rises even a couple of degrees above what they are used to, they bleach, meaning they turn white, and that means they die.

Large parts of the Great Barrier Reef, one of the greatest living systems on this planet, are already gone. It is one of the major environmental tragedies that should be talked about and addressed.

The glaciers are melting

For centuries, humans have looked at glaciers in awe. We paint them, we photograph them, and we write about them. Many mountains that people and even their grandparents grew up seeing are sadly not the same anymore. You can look at a photograph from 50 years ago and then look at the same mountain today and see bare rock where there used to be ice.

It is one of those changes that seems slow and distant until you actually see the pictures. Then the realisation hits differently. Glaciers are also where a huge portion of the world’s freshwater comes from — the water that fills rivers, that farmers use and that entire cities depend on.

Seasons are shifting

In many parts of the world, flowers bloom earlier and birds migrate at the wrong time. Animals that evolved to time their behaviour around temperature and daylight are finding that the cues they rely on no longer match up. Imagine a bee waking up in spring only to find that the flowers it depends on have not bloomed yet. And that’s not a small inconvenience , that’s the beginning of a collapse in a system that has been working for millions of years.

Your voice matters, but not the way you think

You’ve probably heard the list of things to do: use less plastic, take shorter showers, don’t leave the lights on, eat less meat, etc. These things are real and they matter.

The most useful thing a young person can do right now is to truly understand what’s going on. Not just “climate change is bad”, but actually knowing how it works, why it’s happening, who’s responsible, and what needs to change. Because when you understand it, you can talk about it. You can tell other people. You can ask hard questions. You can one day vote for people who will actually do something about it or refuse to buy from companies that don’t care.

Real change happens when the rules change, when governments say you can’t dump certain chemicals anymore, when it becomes cheaper to use solar energy than coal, and when big companies have no choice but to do better. That’s the scale where this problem is actually solved.

Before us. Possibly after us

There’s a tree in Sweden called Old Tjikko, a Norway spruce named by discoverer Leif Kullman after his dog. The trunk is a few hundred years old, but the root system beneath it is almost ten thousand years old. It survived the last ice age. It has been living underground, sending up new trunks as the old ones died, for longer than most human civilisations have existed.

That tree has no idea what’s going on, who lived and who died. It definitely doesn’t know about Earth Day. It’s just living the way it has been for ten thousand years, because the conditions around it allow it to.

And this is the whole point. Everything in nature is just doing what it does — trees, bees, glaciers, oceans. None of it is trying to survive. It just survives, as long as the conditions are right.

The question is whether we are going to be the species that is smart enough to look at what it is doing and actually change course. No other animal can do that. A shark can’t decide to fish less. A wildfire can’t decide to burn less. But we can decide. That’s the strange and almost unfair gift we have. So far, we haven’t fully used it. But we still can.

Happy Earth Day!

Published in Dawn, Young World, April 18th, 2026