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The Wind beneath My Wings

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  My first memory of Ajinkya is that of a tall, lanky, curly haired boy, wearing a chain with a big Aum locket, when he was called out by our Math Professor in our first year of college. Next time was at an Art Exhibition in college where he had oil paintings on display and the third time was during our Statistics practicals when he came and sat next to me and asked for help. This raised quite a few eyebrows as ours was a conservative college where girls and boys sat separately and we had a separate entrance and a separate canteen for girls. From then on we kept meeting and interacting, but it was mostly always in a group. He would sometimes drop me home in his car. I never thought much about it. The first inkling I had that maybe something was different was when he came to pick my friends and me for an inter-collegiate event and presented only me with a rose. My NCC friends started teasing me about him saying that he had fallen for me and I would always brush them off. Till once, when
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Moving from Fixing to Connecting

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  3 rd December is the International Day for Persons with Disability. Disability does not mean just a physical condition; it can be varied in nature. Autism is one such disability that is not reflected physically, it is a result of faulty wiring in the brain. A child with Autism cannot help himself, his brain is wired differently and this causes him to behave differently. They see the world through a different lens, a foggy, fuzzy lens and the world looks at them through a different lens, a child who is crazy, even mad maybe, and who needs to be institutionalised. But they are just like everyone else, somewhat different, but no less. No one knows what causes Autism. Some say it is genetic, some say environmental (increased toxicity and pollution), while some even believe that the vaccinations given after birth are to be blamed as one does not really catch the symptoms till the baby becomes a toddler. If the parents are vigilant, they will catch it early; while others might attribute i
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ABMNM and Autism

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  Picking up from where I left off last time, the Anat Baniel Method NeuroMovement (ABMNM) works very well with all children with special needs, including children on the Autism Spectrum. ABMNM is a very gentle approach. It entails giving FS or Functional Synthesis lessons to the child in which an ABMNM practitioner works one on one with a child. The basic premise of ABMNM is to move away from the Fixing paradigm to Connecting with the child. A child on the spectrum is not a mechanical toy that is broken and needs fixing but is a living, breathing human being that is whole and complete. ABMNM helps create new connections in the brain as a result of which we see various outcomes. The brain, like any other organ in our body, serves a function and the job of the brain is to put order in the disorder and make sense out of the nonsense. Our brain thrives on learning. So, how does the brain learn? Whenever the brain perceives a difference, new connections are formed in the brain and learni
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Through a Different Lens…

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  April is celebrated as the ‘Autism Awareness’ month the world over. Even in our country, there are various NGOs holding events to create awareness about Autism. Autism is not a disease. It is not something that can be cured by prescribing an antibiotic, nor is it something that can be detected by doing some laboratory tests. It is just a way of being. Some people have sexual preferences that are not what is considered ‘normal’ or typical, and there is nothing much that they can do about it. After a lot of struggle, they are slowly being acknowledged by society but they still have a long way to go to become a part of the mainstream. Similarly, a child with Autism cannot help himself, his brain is wired differently and this causes him to behave differently. They see the world through a different lens, a foggy, fuzzy lens. And the world looks at them through a different lens, a child who is crazy, even mad maybe, and who needs to be institutionalized. But they are just like everyone els
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We miss you, Baba.

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  Time flies, and how! It seems just like yesterday that Ajinkya called me and said, “Arti, it looks like we have lost him.” It still seems unreal. He always seemed invincible, almost immortal. There were so many occasions when he had a close brush with death, but he would always bounce back. This time too, we thought, would be no different. A few bottles of saline and he would be home again. But it was not destined to be. In the last year, he had become very frail, but still, he was a source of strength and having him around, made it seem as if nothing could go wrong. I remember last year, just about a week before he passed away, one morning as I was about to leave for work, Arya, my son, came and told me that Aaba is asking for a wheelchair as he is finding it difficult to walk. So, I went and checked on him, he was sitting at the dining table to have his morning tea. I told him to wait till evening and then we would decide. As soon as I got back from work, I went to see him but he w
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This s**t works!

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  Hello everyone! It’s been a long time since I posted, almost three months. After three months of regular fortnightly posts, three months of nothing. It was not because I had not written anything. The current post was ready end of August itself. It was just that after the very personal posts on my mother and sister, I was too emotionally spent to post anything. Or maybe it was because those two posts were for two occasions and now I had no occasion to write for. Or maybe just pure inertia. This post actually was supposed to come immediately after my fourth blogpost, “Man Proposes and God Disposes!” It is a continuation… On successful completion of the Children’s Mastery training of the Anat Baniel Method NeuroMovement (ABMNM), I started my practice in April 2019 at the Academy of Learning and Development, our school for children with special needs. There were a lot of questions in my mind. Hardly anybody knew about ABMNM in India. It was going to be an uphill task, first creating awar
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Happy 60th birthday Tai!

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  The youngest looking, and the youngest Aaji at heart, so much so, that even her granddaughter Anishka calls her Aai and refuses to call her Aaji. At a very early age she took on the responsibility of the house, cooking, cleaning, doing whatever was necessary. A first-class student through-out, she never brought up the subject of doing post-graduation (she did not want to burden my mother with the financial strain it would cause) but chose to take up a job as soon as she finished her final year exams and help support the family. Eventually, she did study law, but that was along with her job. She has had an illustrious career, starting in a small private firm, even before she completed her graduation, moving on to the legal department at Saraswat Bank, SBI Caps, Société Générale and so on. She retired as the Associate Director, Administration at Cognizant Technology Solutions India Pvt. Ltd. where she was managing facilities totalling more than 5 lacs square feet, with more than 5000
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