By Shambhavi Ravishankar

“Though she be but little, she is fierce.” I’m so sure that when Shakespeare wrote those lines in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, he never realised just how apt they would be centuries later to someone living in India, conquering the world and then some. Let me give you some context.

My name is Shambhavi. I was born and live with Alagille Syndrome, which is a rare disease that affects 1 in 100,000 children and has no cure currently. I like to think of myself as a happy accident, because I didn’t inherit the disease from anyone in…

“I was to appear for my 12th board exams, and had nothing on my mind except the diagnosis and all the problems that came with it. I couldn’t help but think and overthink about how bad life would be when I should have been concentrating on my studies as most kids at that stage do,” said Zoyeb Mohamed Zia.

Zoyeb is a 27 year old Chennai resident, who has a rare neurological condition termed as Ataxia. He explains Ataxia is not a particular disease but rather one of the manifestations of a disease condition. The word “Ataxia” means lack of…

Reproduced with permission from the author. First published in Mid-Day on July 3 2016.

One day, while wandering through the countryside, Matsyendranath saw a farmer’s wife crying in front of her house. He divined she was childless. He gave her a fistful of ash and said, “Consume it and you will become pregnant.” The lady accepted the ash but a few hours later was consumed by doubt and fear. She threw the ash in a pit where her family threw cow dung to make manure. Twelve years later, Matsyendranath passed by the same house and, on seeing the woman, said…

Adoption is not an alien word in our family. Infact, when my cousin brought home a sweet little girl after having followed a due process of adoption, we were totally thrilled. I still remember her first ‘adopted’ birthday celebrated with all fun and frolic and how ecstatic the child was with her new-found parents.

After nearly seventeen years since then, my daughter and son-in-law broached the subject and informed us of their intention to adopt. It came like a bolt from the blue and I was flummoxed for a while on how to respond or should we say react. It…

By Kavita Baluni

It has been more than a year since Veda came home. We call her our destined child as we never thought of going for special needs adoption but destiny made us tread into it. Our best decision ever. Every single day we thank God for bringing her into our life.

I have been fascinated with the thought of adoption ever since I was a teenager. I could never understand the significance of having biological children when there were so many children already waiting for a family.

When I met Himanshu (my husband) and shared this thought, he…

According to the World Health Organization, we are eight weeks into the COVID-19 outbreak. What started with the Hubei Province in Central China in December 2019, the coronavirus has spread to more than 83 countries in the world till date.

The signs of infection as per the WHO include fever, cough, shortness of breath and breathing difficulties. In more severe cases, it leads to pneumonia, kidney failure and even death.

As of today, March 6th, over 95,000 people have been affected with coronavirus, and over 3287 have lost their lives to this disease. Of these 53700 people have recovered worldwide…

On August 5th, 2019, Home Minister of India, Amit Shah announced that the government had scrapped Article 370 and 35A of the Indian Constitution by an order from the President of India. The special status of Jammu and Kashmir had been revoked. This resolution was accompanied by the Jammu and Kashmir Reorganisation Bill which turned the state into two Union Territories — Jammu-Kashmir and Ladakh.

After the withdrawal of special status, the government imposed a complete communications shutdown in the valley. …

The Indian Parliament passed the Citizenship Amendment Act, 2019 (CAA) on 11th December 2019. It amended the Citizenship Act of 1955 to issue Indian citizenship to all the Hindus, Buddhists, Jains, Sikhs, Parsis, and Christians from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan who were forced/compelled to flee to India due to religious persecution, before 31 December 2014. Notably absent were the persecuted minorities, mainly Muslims belonging to other South Asian countries.

Since the passage of the CAA, protests have broken out across the country from North East India, who accuses the government of passing fundamentally anti-indigenous and anti-poor legislation. Many others across…