Until recently, most of what I knew about autism came from Rain Man. I was surprised to learn, therefore, that a desi is one of the most famous people with autism in the world. Tito is rare – he is both highly autistic and highly articulate. He can explain himself and his behaviors to doctors, thus providing a window into a condition that is still poorly understood:

Born and raised in India, Tito speaks English with a huge vocabulary. His articulation is poor, and he is often hard to understand. But he writes eloquently and independently, on pads or his laptop, about what it feels like to be locked inside an autistic body and mind…

“I’ve seen Tito sit in front of an audience of scientists and take questions from the floor,” said … an autism expert at Cambridge University. ”He taps out intelligent, witty answers on a laptop with a voice synthesizer. No one is touching him. He communicates on his own.”… [Link]

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p>Tito is one of the most famous individuals with autism in the world, perhaps even more famous than Dr. Temple Grandin:

Several of his poems were published in the National Geographic, the New York Times and Scientific American have published feature stories on him, and BBC has aired an Inside Story documentary about him. His book, Beyond the Silence, which contain writings from when he was between eight and eleven years old, covers the first part of his life story and a special selection of his philosophical texts that were featured on BBC. [Link]

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p>In fact, he’s so prolific that I’m surprised he doesn’t have a blog:

”I need to write,” he said recently, scrawling the words on a yellow pad. ”It has become part of me. I am waiting to get famous.”… [Link]

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p>Although Tito is not the first severely autistic person to express himself clearly, because his case is so high profile, it has contradicted many of the previously held notions about people with autism. In particular, “Tito’s behavior and writings dispel a popular notion that autistic children do not feel empathy.” [Link]

However, it is important to note that both the organization that promotes him and the techniques that his mother used with him have come under fire from autism rights advocates:

Criticism of Mukhopadhyay’s supposedly unique gifts and his mother’s teaching methods comes mainly from the autistic rights movement. Citing previously published poetry and philosophical writing by other autistic people, the movement stresses that Mukhopadhyay is not only not the first to reveal that autistic people think, feel and reason, but that Cure Autism Now, by promoting Mukhopadhyay and his work as a sort of marketed commodity, has deliberately chosen to ignore earlier autistic writers because they didn’t fit a perceived or approved profile … Additionally, the teaching methods employed by Mukhopadhyay’s mother are perceived by critics as violently abusive. [Link]

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p>Tito’s mother who, as written in his own book , beat him so viciously that her husband had to leave the room and her own mother decided she was unfit to parent him. Tito’s mother who … tied a pencil to his hand and withheld food until he’d write. Tito’s mother who is now being held up as a paragon of teachers for autistic children. CAN is paying for a home for her and Tito in Los Angeles, California, while Soma promotes her method of teaching autistic people and Tito gets poked and prodded by scientists. [Link]

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More power and autonomy to Tito. Respect.