BS (Hons) Student Wins Gujarat Government’s Cyber Awareness Initiative Contest

There are different approaches to storytelling. The idea is to get the point across in a way that stays with the audience while conveying the message. Devansh Kashyap, BS (Hons) Class of 2027, chose reels/shorts to communicate the basics of digital hygiene.

His reel won the CAWACH Kendra Reels/Shorts Making Competition, under the theme of Cyber Safety and Digital Hygiene, in the Sarvashreshth (Top) category. Organised by Cybersecurity Awareness And Creative Handholding (CAWACH Kendra), a Government of Gujarat initiative on cyber awareness for students, the competition invited creative approaches to communicating cyber safety and digital hygiene.

Devansh’s short film uses a familiar street-food setting to make the routine act of clicking “Accept” on cookie pop-ups feel tangible and a little unsettling. A street-food vendor sells “cookies” at a stall with a banner reading “ACCEPT OR NOT”, echoing the cookie consent banners commonly seen online.

When a customer asks what is in the cookie, the vendor casually lists “name, number, address, current location”, the kinds of personal data websites can collect when users click “Accept” without reading the fine print. The film concludes with the tagline, “Mind your touch, mind the cookie,” accompanied by a playful animation of an internet cookie icon being “accepted” and bitten into, connecting the everyday snack to digital privacy risks.

“The idea was to make the invisible and routine act of accepting cookie pop-ups feel tangible and prompt viewers to think twice about digital hygiene and online data privacy,” said Devansh.