Shalini Saraswathi, quad amputee and blade runner, said on Saturday that adversity shows how frivolous one’s life is.
Speaking at an interaction on ‘My life, my journey – Combating crisis’, organised by MAHE here, Ms. Saraswathi said that people gave lot of importance to themselves. But it was only after overcoming adversity that they came to know that they should not take themselves that seriously, she said.
Ms. Saraswathi won the bronze medal at the national-level parathletics last year. In 2012, she was infected by a rare bacterial infection, Rickettsial, when on a vacation in Cambodia.
However, doctors thought that it was dengue.
Within a few months, she had a miscarriage. Both her legs and her left hand had to be amputated, and then her right hand broke off. She had to spend about two years confined to her bed.
She explained how she had overcome all the odds with the help of her husband, Prashanth Chowdappa, and her friends. It was with the encouragement of the coach at the Kanteerava Stadium in Bengaluru, B.P. Aiyappa, that she started running short distances before progressing to run long distances, with a pair of blades given to her by a prosthetics company. “But it was not easy to run with the blades in the beginning,” she said.
To a query, she said that people in the country treated persons with disabilities with sympathy or they got “over-inspirational.” “We don’t normalise disabilities,” she said.
Asked about her goals, Ms. Saraswathi said that she did not like goals. But she was planning to take part in sprint in the 2020 Paralympics. “I don’t know if it is going to happen or not. But I hope to get selected,” she said.
To a question whether she believed in god, she said that she was a borderline atheist or agnostic. “But I believe in the existence of energy. If you vibrate at a particular frequency, you get it. If you vibrate positivity, you get it back,” she said. To another question, Ms. Saraswathi said that people should accept what had happened to them. The problem arose when they were in denial, she said.
