About Us

Meet Our Founder

As a little child in New Delhi, life was beautiful. I remember, when I started my schooling, that it was so much fun learning English and Hindi alphabets, mathematics, and drawing. I used to recite prayers and sing the national anthem in the school assembly. In classes, I was the one who read the mathematics table aloud as my classmates repeated after me. But then everything changed when I witnessed violence amongst adults for the first time. I felt wounded and yet so numb that I used to stand in one place for hours without having a single thought. I found myself in shackles. Before, I was scared to sit in the dark, but at this point, I found refuge in darkness. I stopped communicating. When I was asked a question, my words didn’t come out. The school stage that used to be my comfort zone changed into a “battlefield”. One day, the whole class started to stammer “gu-gu-gu-good morning,” and I realized that they were mocking me. My classmates and their parents even complained to the principal that I could be a bad influence and make all of them stammerers. My mother couldn’t believe that her son, whose tongue was as fast as a train and sharp as a razor, was struggling with his speech! Being subject to constant mocking, I completely lost my confidence. I used different strategies to ease my stammering: finding alternatives for words I generally got stuck on, reducing my statements to a minimum, or arriving late to avoid introducing myself. When people tried to help by asking me to slow down or by finishing my sentences, it made me even more conscious. And then there were these weird and rather dangerous advice like licking ashes of cremated bodies or rubbing alum on the tongue until the upper layer was removed. Looking back, my childhood was not easy, but do I regret having a stammer? No. It made me a more sensitive human being. I feel connected with all who are unable to express their thoughts and are longing to be understood. In the summer of 2018, I got in touch with Vinayak, a man who needed almost 7 minutes to introduce himself. He was from The Indian Stammering Association (TISA), and he invited me to attend the annual conference in Delhi. When I listened to the speakers, I was amazed by how confident and comfortable they were while speaking in public. Soon enough, I found myself among my “tribe”, and now we were the ones who made fun of our inabilities, or shall I say, our special style of communication! For the first time, I didn’t have to run away from myself. The next day, we got a task to talk to passengers in the Delhi metro. We explained our challenges and how we felt being ridiculed. People listened to us and signed a pledge to be considerate towards anyone facing a communication problem. All this helped me to be in harmony with myself and to accept that I am a stammerer. Now I can take control of my life, as I realized I am not alone. And BOOM! I jumped back on stage again and took every opportunity to fail miserably, more than ever before. But I did learn one thing: I can now say my name fluently, a name that starts with “PU”—a sound I had always struggled with.