Fighting autism, Thane boy scores 91.2% in SSC board exams

Fighting against all the odds, fifteen-year-old Aditya Rao has acquired an outstanding 91.2% in his SSC board exam, which was announced on Monday. A student of Vashi’s Father Agnel Multipurpose School and Junior College, Aditya and his family have all the reasons to celebrate this day as Aditya is autistic but that did not stop him from excelling in studies.

Speaking with iamin, Aditya's mother, Dr Sharada Rao who is a cardiologist said, “After discovering this problem, we had to give him a lot of speech therapy, occupational therapy and visual exercising. He still has a lot of difficulty in conversing and socialising.”

Dr Sharada, who is overjoyed with her son's success made perfect use of her son’s strengths and the impossible was achieved. “He is very good in visualisation, so we started making him get used to visual tools at a very young age. We had to make him understand every little concept with a video. What a normal kid understands in probably two hours, he would take eight hours for the same. Being in a regular school, studying with the regular kids is not easy. So yes, he has really worked hard for this," said the proud mother.

Aditya, who is also a swimmer, received tremendous help from the Special Educator (teachers who help children with special needs) Mrs Zeeba Rana, who has been working extremely hard on him and has been a consistent support system since his class 5. “I am speechless. We all were worried whether he will sit at one place or not, whether he will be patient and not run or tear papers but he did not. He is a gifted child and has come a long way. You give him two set of numbers, he will look around at the walls and give you the answer in seconds. He's extremely forthcoming and adaptive. I'm not at all surprised by his success," said Rana.

Other autistic children who gave an outstanding performance this year are -‪ Dipti Ganesh (90%) from St Lawrence School, Hushrav Mistry (82.8%) from Nalanda Institute and Sadiq Modak (80%) from Bombay Cambridge Gurukul Trust.

For the longer version of the report, click here