You can’t blame someone for what they learned growing up – that’s what I learned today 🙂

It’s 5: 43 PM on day 430 of my journey towards independence and I’ve managed to brush my teeth, drink coffee by myself, tweet about my Clean Water For All Campaign – no luck – prepare and publish my Disability of the Day feature, feed myself rice and curry for lunch and tweet some more about my campaign – still no luck.

Two days ago I read Arun Shourie on his tale of cerebral palsy and enduring love written by Amrit Dhillon – an article about a father’s unconditional love for his son and the struggles he and his family faced raising a child who has Cerebral Palsy in India (a special thanks to Andi over at Bringing the Sunshine for including a link to this article in Sun-Beams: November 13, 2011 where I found it) – and in the article Arun Shourie – the dad – talked about how parents of special needs children in India basically hid their children from the outside world and refused to talk about them when I read that I realized that my father being ashamed of me had nothing to do with me and everything to do with the country he grew up in suffice to say I feel a whole lot better about myself now than I did two days ago – all this time I thought my dad treated me horribly because of something I did when in reality he was just treating me the way people treated disabled people in India when he was growing up. Do you still believe what you learned growing up even though you know in your head that it’s complete nonsense?

Are we connecting on Twitter? If not, say hi at http://twitter.com/Nisha360

If you’ve given to my cause or you can’t give now, please help me by sharing my cause with others. You can tweet about it like my friend Stan Faryna. This is the tweet he uses: @Nisha360 is a brave, smart young woman trying to make a better world for us all. Please help her do an amazing thing. http://bit.ly/hC7vOu

Stan’s very sweet for saying so, but feel free to write what reflects you best.

Thanks to all my friends out there who are helping me make my dream come true: to make a better world for all of us!