ADITYA TIWARI
His Facebook profile describes him as ‘a ray of hope and happiness which welcomes everyone’. And Aditya Tiwari, 28, indeed proved that when he endured “mental, emotional and financial trauma” for 18 months only to adopt a child with Downs’ Syndrome who he saw on a visit to an orphanage in Indore in 2014. But the adoption was far from easy—he was a single man, 27-years-old and the orphanage had decided to give up the five month-old boy for international adoption. “I later realised it was a racket; they had kept the child illegally and hadn’t registered him in the government records which is mandatory,” says Tiwari, a software engineer with Barclays in Pune. He made over 30 trips from Pune to Bhopal in a year’s time, wrote numerous letters and petitions to everyone from the Prime Minister and the Women and Child Welfare Minister to the Madhya Pradesh government.
The do-gooder In July this year, when Tiwari tied the knot, instead of inviting relatives and friends, he celebrated the occasion by providing a feast and gifts for 10,000 underprivileged people and food for 1000 animals from shelters, stray animals and the zoo. “These were my real guests,” he says. Even as he plays a doting father to two year-old son Avnish, Tiwari is already working on setting up a shelter for abandoned and homeless animals and has formed a support group of parents of child with disabilities.