New Delhi [India], December 3 (ANI): It has been a few weeks since the India Inclusion Summit ended--weeks in which the noise of daily life returned, but the silence inside me deepened. Weeks in which the world slipped back into familiar rhythms, but my own rhythm felt rearranged. In these weeks, I have sat with my sorrow, sifted through my shock, and watched my emotions settle like sediment in still water. And only now--after distance and deliberation--have I understood the gravitas of what those days in Bangalore revealed.
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Because the people I met there live lives that are vast, vulnerable, valiant, and victorious--lives so large, so luminous, so layered with bravery that they embarrass our brittle fragilities. They endure challenges we do not even have the vocabulary to name, and yet they wake with courage, walk with conviction, work with commitment, and smile with a strength that feels sacred.
Meanwhile, we--who collapse at the hint of heartbreak, who crumble at the smallest slight, who spiral at a sprain--call them brave. We are broken by inconveniences. They are buoyed by impossibilities. We drown in details. They rise through storms.
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And today--as India marks World Disability Day, and as the President of India confers the National Awards this very morning upon four extraordinary members of the India Inclusion Foundation--I understand with crystalline clarity:
The people we pity are often the people we should be learning from.
The people we overlook are often the people illuminating our future.
I walked into the India Inclusion Summit 2025 thinking I understood empathy. I walked out knowing I had been living half-blind.
It was the thirteenth year of this gathering--thirteen years of ferocity and faith, thirteen years of families who refuse to let the world diminish their children. And though the Summit lasted only a weekend, it has lived in me ever since, tugging at my thoughts, unsettling my certainties, deepening my understanding of dignity.
Before I went onstage, I asked myself:
"Why am I here? What claim do I have in this cathedral of courage?"
And then Ferose VR--the father, the poet, the quiet philosopher-general of the movement--looked at me with a gaze that was soft, steady, and startlingly wise. He wasn't inviting me as a chef or columnist. He was inviting me as someone who has been othered my whole life--not for disability, but for who I dared to love.
The Summit began with a message from former Chief Justice D.Y. Chandrachud, recorded at one in the morning--a father speaking of his two daughters who live with disability. A man whose public power pales before his private tenderness. He said:
Martin Luther King Jr.'s truth echoed across continents and decades:
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."
And suddenly, Chandrachud's conviction became a call to conscience.
Then came Prateek Khandelwal--the ramp-builder, the barrier-breaker, the entrepreneur who turns every obstacle into an opportunity. He rolled onto the stage with a grin that belonged in cinema and a mind that belonged in mathematics.
"I'm a banya," he laughed,
"I've taken my disability and made money off it. Don't admire me. Talk to me."
And I shrank inside--remembering my own eighteen months of legal blindness, when I could see only three feet from one eye and had quietly given up on living. I retreated. He rose.
Then strode in Tinkesh Kaushik--missing three limbs, missing nothing of life.
A man who has scuba-dived, sky-jumped, and climbed toward Mount Everest--as far as the mountain allowed a body missing three limbs to go.
"The only thing worse than being blind is having sight but no vision."
The lights softened as Gayatri Gupta entered with her mother, Shalini Gupta--a duo stitched together by devotion and defiance. Gayatri's art has glided through Christie's, bloomed across airports, and lives in private collections far beyond Bangalore. Her canvases do not whisper. They command.
And today--right now, on this very World Disability Day--Gayatri Gupta receives the National Award from the President of India.
Her mother's pride must be glowing across galaxies.
And then came the quiet revolution of MITTI Cafe, founded by the fierce Alina Alam, run entirely by adults with disabilities. A workplace where dignity is the default, ability is assumed, inclusion is infrastructural.
If India needs a recipe for equality, it is written there.
These stories have lived in me for weeks--echoes turning into lessons, murmurs becoming mantras.
But today--on World Disability Day, live and unfolding--the meaning feels even more monumental.
PAVITHRA YS
Managing Trustee of the India Inclusion Foundation and MD of Vindhya-e-Infomedia. A woman who built one of India's largest impact enterprises, employing thousands with disabilities.
Founder of Saarathee, an Inclusion Fellow rewriting the future of equitable employment in India.
Art for Inclusion Fellow, visionary painter, daughter of Shalini Gupta--receiving her National Award today.
The luminous host of last year's Summit, a woman whose voice carries both truth and tenderness.
Her mother, Shweta Runwal, an Inclusion Fellow, has been a steward of stories and a strategist of change.
Together, they embody intergenerational courage.
We--the able-bodied--are often the ones disabled by denial.
What I witnessed in Bangalore could easily have electrified New York.
If this exact summit had taken place in Manhattan,
the world would have worshipped it as a masterpiece of moral imagination.
So today--World Disability Day, right now, as the nation watches--I offer this:
They deserve equality, empathy, engagement, and everyday companionship.
For the only disability this country cannot survive
is our refusal to see one another as immensely, imperfectly, incandescently human.
And if the India Inclusion Summit--thirteen years young and thirteen layers deep--has taught us anything, it is this:
The people we pity are often the people we should emulate.
The people we overlook are the people who will lead us forward. (ANI/Suvir Saran).
Disclaimer: Suvir Saran is a Masterchef, Author, Hospitality Consultant And Educator. The views expressed in this article are his own.