The Normalcy of Human

My nephew, Raghav has autism and this weekend I was witness to the excellence that resides in being normal. Now normal is not normal in my family. There is nothing normal about a family that is populated by lawyers, doctors, psychiatrists, neurosurgeons, engineers, banking and finance professionals, internet influencers, scientists, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, inventors, university deans, marketing professors, Rhodes scholars, and Fullbright fellows. You can imagine what a gathering at my family is like…. Definitely not normal.

The word normal is such a loaded term. It literally explodes in your face shattering your self-esteem with its shrapnel of competition, comparison, and adulation. And Raghav gives me an entry point into a new world where friendship, fellowship, and feeling happy is the foundation of true normalcy not Raghav’s spectacular wizardry of memory or play with numbers and addresses.

Where the humanness of connections that Raghav displays leaves me with the feeling that maybe rather than spending time wandering through life collecting colored glass beads of “accomplishments” Raghav has simply leapfrogged over us all to reach the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

Raghav Swaminathan my mentor in the supremacy of humanness