by Ruel Khadilkar, Grade 9
The crowd and atmosphere at the NLF Reading Challenge Finale 2025 was exhilarating, with the audience waiting in silence as teams came up with their answer, followed by deafening roars when they got the answers right. Along with showcasing the teams’ immense motivation and commitment to actively take part in the challenge and become the top 4 out of 600+ teams across India, there was a lot I took away from and admired about this event. From the variety of quiz categories such as taboo and rapid-fire, all the way to the special audience-specific questions, this finale was interactive and kept everyone on their toes. My personal favourite category was the crossword puzzle, where each answer belonged to a specific book from the challenge.
Speaking of the books featured in the Challenge, I really enjoyed how diverse the selection was, and the quiz had particular cultural details from India and beyond thrown into the mix, so I actually became more aware of the world just sitting there for an hour. I can only imagine what three months of being immersed in those books would do. It was all the more personal when we had authors featured in the challenge reading out questions on the screen, which I felt was the perfect full-circle moment for the participants. We had authors watching the challenge and participating in the festival as well, so contestants could feel that one step more connected to what they had been reading.
Everyone’s hands were shooting up at any question being thrown at them, especially the little kids. Funny how it’s so much more impactful when people are focused on actual stories in front of them rather than the ones on their Instagram, and this event was exactly that. Everyone, I mean the whole tent, was cheering throughout the quiz; you really felt like each and every person was a part of it.
No matter how corny this sounds, I saw the power of teamwork in action at the event. Every team was smiling and having the time of their life on stage, (living the dream, you could say) appreciating their teammates when they got an answer correct, dancing to the filler music running in the background in between rounds. I would assume that these three months of hard work would have only brought them closer together.
Overall, I took a lot away from watching this event: how much we can connect with the rest of the world through literature, how it’s the one thing that despite geographical barriers unites us all. In our current age, we are lucky enough to have translations so that people from the opposite end of the world can enjoy the traditions and cultures elsewhere, like Kiki’s Delivery Service, a book I discovered was originally Japanese because of the Challenge.
Today, those kids from four different places in India found themselves together just based on the books they’d read. What is this, if not a perfect symbol for the scope and everlasting mark literature has on us from the time we are small children, children whose only access to the world around us is through what we hear and read? What is childhood without stories?
