Dr. Ramnarayan Syag has been with ComMutiny from the very beginning. As a board member, he has been actively involved in the Youth Collective’s journey - a journey that has changed his life along with the lives of those he has mentored.

“After joining ComMutiny, I made a personal and professional commitment to invest more time in youth work and learn more about it. I took one month off in a year to connect with youth organisations. It gave me a chance to interact with diverse youth from various states. I realised that there were several groups working with children but there were only a few people doing youth work. This compelled me to slowly move to this field,” says Dr. Syag.
“My perspective about youth work has evolved over the years. I have always believed that children and youth have the innate need to learn. After seeing so many youth pursuing their passion despite the challenges, this conviction has grown stronger,” he says.

Dr. Syag stresses on the need to create youth addas in schools and colleges so that they become a part of the curriculum and eventually the culture. “As a society, we are passing through a difficult phase where violence and extremism are on the rise...ComMutiny’s work helps young people to learn democratic values such as equality, fraternity and human dignity and practice them in their day to day behaviour,” he says. 
It’s not just the young people who learn valuable lessons with ComMutiny. Dr. Syag also feels that being a part of the Youth Collective enables him to learn continuously and probe into deeper questions. Today he combines his passion with his expertise to work on the interlinkage between the Constitution and youth leadership. 

As a result of his engagement with ComMutiny, Dr. Syag’s other projects on Panchayati Raj and active citizenship have moved beyond knowledge building and now focus on action-oriented experiential learning. He says, “I started to initiate conversations about creating youth-centric spaces within other organisations that I am associated with. I began to think about how to include elements of joy, fun and friendship in our work by balancing the head (intellect), heart (feelings) and hand (learning by doing).”
Out of the several ways in which Dr. Syag contributes to ComMutiny, he finds mentorship the most impactful. He has instilled confidence among many young people who were a part of the Changelooms fellowship. 

He says, “When I go for my mentoring sessions, I visit the fellows in their homes, spend time with them and their families and see their community. In the early days, I mentored some female fellows who wanted to do social work but their parents were quite skeptical about their decision because they felt it was not a secure career. I was able to address their parents’ doubts by sharing my personal experience of being a social worker for over 30 years.”
Dr. Syag also worked towards making the mentoring process more organic and smooth. He explains, “Mentoring requires patience because you need to look at the young person's worldview without judgement and understand their perspective.” 
Dr. Syag has played a crucial role in shaping the Samvidhan LIVE! campaign. He feels co-creation was key in this process. “I worked together with We The People, Ashraf, Arjun and Meenu to co-create Samvidhan LIVE!. The emphasis was on moving from blaming to claiming power. We discussed ways to make the Constitution relevant in a common person's daily life wherein they could take concrete action,” he says.

“ComMutiny as a space itself is so vibrant that we come up with great ideas when we get together. Seeds germinate when they get the right kind of soil. Our ideas are like those seeds and they require a proper environment which the Youth Collective offers.”
Dr. Syag also feels that ComMutiny needs to include more youth from small towns and villages and work further on diversity. He says, “We need to look beyond urban youth and this is something we are still working on.” According to him, ComMutiny has designed a system and tools that can promote social inclusion. However, it needs to be scaled up.

“ComMutiny has a clear perspective on social inclusion and we work on it too...groups like ours can demonstrate inclusion in one direction but everybody has to take action to make inclusion a reality. For instance, our campaign Samjho Toh Na was an exercise in inclusion which provided youth the chance to become friends with people from completely different backgrounds. By doing such a pilot project and creating content around it, we present an example. But until these projects become a social, cultural and political movement, they will remain small islands.” 
Although ComMutiny is an organisation, Dr. Syag sees it as a large campaign which is gradually unfolding in various forms in solidarity with multiple stakeholders. His dream for ComMutiny is to bring together lots of young people, organisations, citizens groups, educational programmes, cultural groups etc to expand the movement and make a bigger impact. He says, “The dream will take long to come true...it’s a work in progress.”