Hindustan Times ST (Mumbai) - Live
Vile Parle’s small wonder dreams big
Ishot up suddenly in the eighth standard, getting to five foot nine over a few months. I was confident that by the time I got to college, I would be a sixfooter. (For some reason, this mattered very much back then.) My genotype however had other plans and I had to settle for five foot ten and kept saying, ‘Cheated by two inches.’
When I meet Muthu Kumar in Nehru Nagar, he has come down from his first floor home to meet me. As he precedes me up the stairs, I notice that he has to use his upper body to climb, taking hold of the banister and hauling himself up from step to step.
Muthu Kumar is 35 years old and is three feet tall and as a little person, his legs are short. This means that even the ordinary act of climbing the stairs is something of an aerobic exercise.
Up in his office, Muthu Kumar scrambles into a chair and tells me about himself. He is one of four children. He has an elder brother who is also a little person who lives in Salem and two brothers who are, in his words, ‘normal’. His father died when he was four years old but his mother, Nirmala, was the powerhouse of the family.
“She was a ragpicker,” Muthu says, “But she didn’t want her children to grow up in a bad environment so she put us in a hostel and worked to make sure that we got an education.”
Muthu Kumar went to Mithibai College where he got a BCom. “It wasn’t easy. I didn’t have many friends. I didn’t know how to talk to people or make friends. I simply went to class and looked at the teacher or at my notes. I didn’t look left or right. And after class, I went straight to the library.”
Muthu took a job for a while but he found that office work did not suit him. “I left and took up tuitions. I used to teach big children, up to even the degree level but now I focus on small children. I only teach the senior classes when someone has failed an examination or has such low marks that he or she might fail,” he says. He is now a full-time social worker.
Apart from the tuitions, he serves his community in a number of ways. One of these is to organise games, sports and other activities for the children of the less developed areas of Nehru Nagar. “They have no place to play so every week I organise games and other activities in the temple compound at the end of the lane,” he says.
I remind him that we are supposed to walk together. He says, “I can’t walk very far. I can do about a kilometer without getting tired but after that…’
I suggest that we could walk in Nehru Nagar and he brightens up immediately. “In this area I can walk any amount, no problem. But when I go out it is difficult.” And in so saying, he illuminates for me another aspect of walking. It is not just your legs that are moving your body forward. Your mind must also play its role. Of course, even balance is a mind game, we are told and it takes a cerebral insult like a stroke to remind us how much we need the brain to make walking possible.
But even without these extremes, when one is walking through an unfamiliar space, one’s brain must work even harder, taking in the new material on offer, making decisions, making choices.
“I take autos everywhere,” says Muthu Kumar. “There are many things in which I am involved and there are training programmes that I must attend with NGOs like Yuva. I work with them. Now if I have to go to Kharghar, I have to take the train.”
You have only to think about pulling yourself up about forty steps at the Vile Parle station while negotiating hundreds of full-sized commuters doing the Mumbai Scuttle to work. You have only to think of getting into a compartment stuffed with people, many of whom are dangling their haversacks around your head.
And yet Muthu Kumar—or Chinna as he is known in his area—still wants to help his community, to help people in general so much that he is willing to go where he must.
As we walk to the temple, it is clear that he is a familiar and well-respected figure, having travelled far from the young man who made no friends in college. The euphonious name Chinnanna— Chinna Anna, or Elder Brother Chinna in Tamil— rings out in a variety of childish voices, many of them taller than their teacher already.
Chinnanna has big plans. He has started the process of registering his charity, Way of Hope. He knows whereof he speaks. “I am in good health now by God’s grace,” he says. “But there were at least three times that I came close to death as a child. My mother nursed me and motivated me to recover. There must be some reason I am here still.”
IT IS NOT JUST YOUR LEGS THAT ARE MOVING YOUR BODY FORWARD. YOUR MIND MUST ALSO PLAY ITS ROLE.