RHON­DOR DOWLAT

Se­nior Re­porter

rhon­dor.dowlat@guardian.co.tt

Teenag­er Daniel Ra­jku­mar has copped his sec­ond con­sec­u­tive Gold Award in The Queen’s Com­mon­wealth Es­say Com­pe­ti­tion 2023.

Fol­low­ing his Gold achieve­ment last year, Ra­jku­mar, 13, who lives in Mara­bel­la and San­gre Grande, de­cid­ed to write an es­say on the top­ic, “Why does your voice mat­ter?” He ex­plored the theme of cli­mate change in his piece ti­tled Guardian Voic­es, which even­tu­al­ly earned him the Gold Award.

In 2023, there were a record-break­ing 34,924 en­tries to the Queen’s Com­mon­wealth Es­say Com­pe­ti­tion.

Ra­jku­mar, who won the Sil­ver Award in the 2021 edi­tion of the com­pe­ti­tion, told the Guardian Me­dia he was in­spired to write his piece be­cause of T&T’s par­tic­u­lar sce­nario as a small is­land state.

“We can­not ig­nore changes in our cli­mate. We have ex­pe­ri­enced ex­treme weath­er events that ham­per our day-to-day life and our well-be­ing. The world has to man­age cli­mate change,” he said.

He ded­i­cat­ed his piece to cli­mate change aware­ness in T&T and to the world at large.

His par­ents Mar­vin Ram­nar­ine and Cher­ry Ann Ra­jku­mar, in con­grat­u­lat­ing him, point­ed out that he was a “won­der­ful, hard–work­ing, kind and ded­i­cat­ed young man who thinks a lot and who per­se­veres in al­ways do­ing his best.”

They ex­pressed their grat­i­tude to Daniel’s grand­moth­er Su­san Ra­jku­mar, who pro­vid­ed a sup­port­ive en­vi­ron­ment for him to ex­press his tal­ent, adding that Daniel was part of the hy­brid sys­tem of ed­u­ca­tion of flex­i­ble learn­ing, where chil­dren ex­plore their pas­sions and de­vel­op ac­cord­ing­ly.