Dubai teen starts website with only happy news to counter corona woes

Dubai: A 17-year-old Grade 12 Indian student in Dubai has created a website to promote positivity amid the global pandemic.

Speaking to Gulf News, Anoushka Ghosh, who was born in India but grew up in Dubai, said, “There is enough positivity and so many pleasant stories going around, they needed to be highlighted.”

Her website, called Happy News, aggregates motivational and optimistic stories from around the world. It also has the latest in sports, business and entertainment plus a separate section on technology and COVID-19 vaccines.

Anoushka explained: “As I looked around, the news is not all gloomy. There are sprouts of positivity growing in different places in the world which are just not getting the news space that it should get in people’s mind. I felt such news need to be actively promoted, as positivity needs to be spread, not only for our mental health but also for the economy,”

“It (Happy News) is like a happiness-booster website with doses of positivity,” said Anoushka, who added a mobile App will be coming soon.

Anoushka said her website aggregates news by measuring the ‘happiness quotient’ of stories published by various global news sites.

“I automated the entire process using AI (artificial intelligence) and now kept manual intervention to a minimum after I completed the setup. I used different technologies such as Natural Language Processing, which is a new AI domain, python code and Linus,” she explained.

“I currently fetch news from eight countries including the UAE, US, India, UK, Canada, Australia, Singapore and Switzerland, keeping in mind the mix of UAE’s population. I also fetch twitter feeds from major news sites and search twitter for happy news topics, such as ‘birthdays’, ‘pets’, ‘celebrations’ etc. which gave me many positive news articles to display,” Anoushka added.

“This (Happy News) is not any commercial endeavour, but my outreach to the community to spread positivity and help with the mental health of the general public, particularly the youth,” continued the Year 12 student, who started coding in May this year and launched the website in July.

Supportive parents

For technical and back-end support, Anoushka is assisted by her father Arnab Ghosh, 45, who works as an innovation consultant for an O&G (oil and gas) company; and mother, Momy Ghosh. Her parents are both originally from Kolkata, the capital of India’s West Bengal state.

“Anoushka has always been concerned with the mental health of her friends and family from a young age. She wanted to leverage her skills in Maths and AI to help them in some way. She has promoted the project with her close network of friends and family but would like to spread the message of positivity to the broader UAE community,” Arnab told Gulf News.

“My daughter created a website for people to see all the positivity happening the world and get a ray of hope,” he added.