Standing crooked, yet tall with determination

Watching Akash stir out of the armchair and stand up can make your heart skip a beat.

Between the cerebral palsy and the leg spasming, his limbs are so crooked that he looks like he’s about to fall down at any given point of time.

“No!” he says shaking his head vehemently, when his mother Meenakshi brings his steel walking-assist stick. All through school right up to the day he finished his +2 exams, Akash has been at loggerheads with his mother against using any sort of support to walk, “I can do it,” he says. It is this determination that pushed the boy to score a whopping 189/200 in computer science - a paper that has seen a drastic upwing this year.

“Every day, he studies only for half an hour. Not a minute more,” complains his mother, “If only he had pushed himself a little more, he would’ve done much better than 1031/1200,” she adds. 

With his father working at the Pondicherry University through the week, Meenakshi gave up her promising teaching career to tend to Akash’s needs - which meant chauferring him by bike from their house in Mogappair to Velammal school everyday and picking him up again and pushing him to study.

All the pushing is of no use, says his mother with resignation, “Especially if there is a India or CSK match on TV.” A huge fan of Mahendra Singh Dhoni, Akash’s memory and love for numbers is so precise that he corrects about how many runs Dhoni has notched up this IPL season; “314”, he says confidently.

Wait, didn’t he score 4 runs against the Sunrisers last night, “Including those 4 runs, anna!” he protests.