“Ordinary people with extraordinary courage” forms the crux of author and former journalist Sudha Menon’s latest book Gifted. Launched recently at Starmark in the city, the book is a collection of stories of 15 people with disabilities. With two decades of journalistic experience to back her, Sudha travelled across the country to meet these “everyday people”, whose stories, she feels, “must be told”.
Ashwin Karthik, a software engineer who is a quadriplegic, Dr. Suresh Advani, a pioneering bone-marrow transplant specialist bound to a wheel-chair, visually-impaired George Abraham, who fights for the cause of those like him…Sudha tells the stories of men and women who “started life with a terrible disadvantage”.
Sudha spent two years on the book, which she has co-authored with V. R. Ferose, the founder of the India Inclusion Summit. Around 30 people were interviewed in the process, 15 of whom were selected to be featured so that there was a “diversity of stories”.
Sudha says that working on the book has changed her in many ways. “I realised we need to be grateful for what we have; that we need to appreciate the little things in life.”
Every person Sudha interviewed left an impression on her. “It was an emotionally taxing experience,” she says. She also realised how much the system has failed people with disabilities in India. “We marginalise them; pretend they don’t even exist. How many such people do we see in a museum, a sports shop or a book store? There are no public toilets for people with disabilities in our cities,” she says. “The failure of the system in our country is shameful.”
Sudha says that the government must create public spaces that are inclusive of the differently-abled. “When we plan a new railway station, for instance, we must ensure that there are ramps to enable access to people with disabilities,” she adds.
Sudha has two other titles to her credit — Legacy, a book of letters written by inspirational men and women of the country to their daughters, and Leading Ladies that tells the story of women who hold prestigious positions in various organisations.
The 48-year-old quit her job in the media in 2009 to write. “I’ve always wanted to become a writer,” she says. Her father, a railways trade union leader, ensured she was surrounded by books in her younger days. “I grew up reading a lot of Russian classics,” she says. “Even back then, I wanted to tell stories.”
About writing fiction she says, “Some day, I will. May be when I’m 80 or something. Till then, there’s so much to observe and write about in real life.”
Sudha is next working on a women-oriented subject. “I’m fascinated by the stories of women,” she says. “She becomes the focal point of expectations of everyone in the family.”
Sudha enjoys writing non-fiction, for she finds the true stories of people to have all the elements of a gripping best-seller — drama, romance, action. “Why would I want to create an imaginary world?”