By Yash Balaji
The keynote speaker at this year’s Hopewell Valley Mayors’ Breakfast was 16-year-old Yash Balaji, a student at Hopewell Valley Central High School and one of five winners of the Marvel Guardians of Good contest.
Guardians of Good, billed as a search for “real world Guardians of the Galaxy,” coincided with Walt Disney Studios’ July 21 premiere of the movie of the same name. Guardians of Good honored young adults ages 14-18 living in the United States “who, through science, service or innovation, are bettering their communities on a local, national or galactic level.”
Balaji, a resident of Pennington, earned a walk on the red carpet for his “CleanBottle,” an invention that he hopes will help solve the problem of the world’s clean drinking water shortage. Balaji says it uses UV LED lights to kill harmful bacteria and create drinkable water.
The annual mayors’ breakfast, an event of the Hopewell Valley Municipal Alliance, took place Oct. 16 at Hopewell Valley Golf Club. Below is a slightly edited version of the speech Balaji gave at the breakfast.
I took a trip to India last summer. Traveling around the country, I saw how difficult it was for us to get the most basic necessity of life: clean water. We had to buy bottled water or boil tap water.
If water was so hard to come by for me, imagine how hard it must be in rural villages, poverty stricken cities, and disaster zones. Even here, clean drinking water was needed after Sandy and Katrina.
I like to think that I’m an inventor, and for a while I’d been thinking about how to purify water more easily. This year, I finally figured it out.
Most of the areas that lack clean water also lack electricity and resources. This is why current water cleaners don’t work that well. People don’t have the electricity to power the devices, there’s nowhere to keep buying filters, or they don’t have enough money to buy some expensive system.
Well, my invention, the CleanBottle, fixes this. It purifies water without any batteries or plugs. Just by holding it, you can kill things like hepatitis, cholera and salmonella. It doesn’t require any outside power source, no need for any charging or electricity or batteries.
I don’t want to toot my own horn, but this is big. You don’t need any infrastructure or money to hold a water bottle. You just need hands. And most people have those. This could help millions of people. Save millions of lives. People living in slums, refugees in camps, disaster victims could all have that elemental source of life: water.
The problem with this is, I’m just a kid. I have one Twitter follower, and it’s not Bill Gates. So there’s not really many ways to get the word out or funding. It’s a good thing Disney took care of that.
I entered my invention in to Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy Guardians of Good Competition. The name is long, but the story is short: I won! They flew me to Los Angeles, where I got to meet the other four winners. All of us were trying to make the world a better place through science, service, and innovation, and Disney rewarded us for it.
We got to tour Disney Studios; we walked the red carpet with Bradley Cooper, Chris Pratt and Zoe Saldana at the premiere; we met with innovators at Disney, NASA, MIT, and more; and we got an exclusive behind the scenes tour of Disneyland. However cool that sounds, multiply it by 100 and that’s what it felt like.
What really blew me away, other than everything, was that all of them had known what I had done. From the director of the movie to president of Marvel, everyone knew about the CleanBottle, and the story was picked up by the Trenton Times, Reuters, Yahoo and more. Even when I told people I had just met about the CleanBottle, they believed I could do big things. People believed in me, and people believed in my idea. But I’m not unique. I’m lucky.
Lots of kids have ideas, and while they may not be like mine, they could do big things with them, too. I got lucky in that everyone around me has been so supportive and that I’ve found the opportunities that allowed me to move forward, but this isn’t true for everyone.
Sometimes it’s not an invention, but a passion for art, or a love of dancing, or maybe a desire to explore the Amazon. Someone might want to cure cancer, someone might want to premier a film at Cannes. Everyone has something different that is their CleanBottle, but not everyone gets the opportunity to do so like I did. I got really, really lucky.
That’s why I’m here. Everyone has the power to help kids change the world, to give us more opportunities, make it easier for us to pursue our passions. I’m lucky that I live in a school district that gives us opportunities to pursue interests like finance or ceramics, but that doesn’t mean we can’t do more.
Everyone has their own CleanBottle, their big idea, their one calling. All they need is an opportunity to take it and run—fly even.
Give us the opportunity to change the world. We won’t disappoint you.
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