Independence Day Celebrations with purpose!

Independence Day always calls for a celebration and remembering the sacrifices of the many. It always makes me think about what we can do for the nation in today's times. What we do with this freedom gifted to us matters more now as we crossed 79+ years of being a free India. I've always missed purpose during celebrations and deeply feel a community coming together from different walks of lives to solve something is one of the most satisfying things.

This time I had the opportunity to attend the much talked about Akan Aahuvaanam ("Akan invites") a fundraiser with The Good Talk Factory for autism education, awareness, and the ecosystems that sustain them.

Amidst the music, well dressed and trained staff of Akan who served us food on a banana leaf there was something more memorable for me. Apart from meeting Jayesh Ranjan ji of course 😊

A stall run by Rising Sun Child Therapy, a center that educates and supports neurodivergent kids, I walked in expecting to just listen and observe but then I spent quite sometime with them trying to understand this and asked all the questions I had.

What struck me first was the staff ..young, sharp, quietly optimistic. The kind of optimism you only earn by watching real progress up close. In them I found a rare mix of scientific rigor, patience, and empathy, none of it felt forced.

Then came the stall's real gift (not a pamphlet which I would have made a boat of), but a sensory experience center. We were led into a darkened corner, told to close our eyes, and asked to simply feel, touch,  hear things we encounter in our daily lives and were asked us to identify them. For smell, they passed around spices and everyday kitchen staples. I named almost everything instantly years of cooking had turned it into muscle memory. That's exactly the point the instructors were making: these senses can be trained. Their real work is teaching kids to use their senses without being overwhelmed by them, dialling down the disturbance until it's manageable and when a tantrum hits anyway, meeting it with patience, consideration, and empathy, not correction. Not just the kids but to parents too. As a person I realised I was doing many things wrong in how to approach and communicate.

A few minutes inside that world was enough to show me how much control most of us take for granted. My understanding stopped being theoretical after that. Kudos to the staff Sunaina,Anusha,Swetha,Varsha, Sooraj, Sidra and many others whom I interacted with.

I wasn't told about sensory sensitivity and stimulation before like this,

It made me think, with real weight about parents who live this every single day, not for five minutes in a guided exercise like the one I took but for years, without an off switch. My respect for them grew enormously that afternoon. I have a few friends who do this day in and day out and I'm definitely going to reach out to them.

If there's one thing I took away, it's the least we can do and maybe the most important thing we can do is show compassion, and include these kids in what they already love doing.

Rising Sun operates in Hyderabad and Chennai, doing work that rarely makes headlines but quietly makes society more humane. Independence Day is, at its core, about the freedom to belong. Spending it helping build that freedom for someone else felt like the truest way to celebrate it.

Please educate yourselves about this by searching, watching basic videos about Autism.

It really needs to be mainstream.

With a definite tear in my eye writing this, signing off!