Battling neurological ailment for 8 years,DU girl emerges winner

On Saturday,Nivya struggled to reach for the pen that this correspondent offered her. She then held it with all five fingers and scribbled her first name below a paragraph that served as a sample of her current handwriting.

That paragraph too,had no errors. The font was,however,thrice the size in 2001. Every alphabet was a new sketch; she had lost control of one in particular,and the resulting scrawl was a vertical line that cut three lines below it.

On her way to school on May 3,2002,13-year-old Nivya vomited,then went into coma for three months. Cerebellar Haematoma with Angioma,the doctors called her condition.

“We had no idea what had happened. The nurses merely told me that she had become like a new-born baby. It took me two months to understand that it meant she would not be able to even brush her teeth by herself,” recalls Geetha.

Nivya Subramanian went to do BCom (Hons) from Maitreyi College of Delhi University,then took a year off to prepare for CAT. She scored a creditable 77.57 percentile this year,which earned her calls from two IIMs. She was also admitted to the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) and the Indian Institute of Forest Management.

Nivya had just started Class IX when tragedy struck. “I would run after the doctors,asking them about her chances. All pointed towards the sky. Her first words came in October that year,” Geetha said.

In January,Nivya’s school friends brought the time-table for the annual exams. “She insisted on taking her final exams without attending classes even for a day,” chips in her father N H Subramanian.

“I thought she would not sit for more than one paper. I was scared when I saw her come out of the exam hall on the first day — she was so tired. She went on to take all five,” says Geetha. She passed three.

Nivya has a disability of 75 per cent — she is completely dependent on others for movement even now. She has difficulty talking. “I get tired after writing for about two hours in a three-hour paper. Therefore,I write short answers and try to answer all questions,” Nivya reveals her strategy after some prompting and then withdraws into her shell.

“She never complains. She has never told us of the pain she went through when she was in coma,” says the proud father.

In fact,her parents thought all was well in terms of her education till Nivya failed to clear a paper in the second year. She re-appeared,but failed to clear it. “We realised her poor handwriting was difficult for invigilators to read,who might have thought they were marking the answersheet of a careless student,” says Subramanian.

Nivya says: “The CBSE asks you to mark whether you are a disabled candidate in the answersheets. Delhi University does not do that.”

Nivya got calls from IIM Ranchi and Lucknow for group discussion sessions. She did not attend one,and failed to clear the other. After not getting her preferred course in TISS,she has now chosen a postgraduate diploma programme in Global Business Operations at Shri Ram College of Commerce.

“I thought she was too ambitious. But one of her CAT counsellors,after an interaction with her,told me that the disability was in my mind,not hers,” says Subramanian.