Leading with a life of courage and dignity

Preethi Sreenivasan had a high flying athletic career at a very young age. She was the youngest to play for the Tamil Nadu Women’s Cricket Team, at the age of eight. She went on to captain the U-19 TN Cricket team to its only victory, in 1997. Apart from this, she was also a national level swimmer at the age of eight. But her awe-inspiring sprint in the sports world came to an abrupt end in its prime.

On July 11, 1998, on her way back to Chennai from a college trip to Puducherry, Preethi slipped and fell on a private beach they stopped by and, as soon as her body hit the water, she became paralysed below her neck. “I excelled in every area for the first 18 years of my life, but, suddenly, I found myself confined to a wheelchair,” says Preethi.

But, this did not defeat her high spirits. Now, despite being a quadriplegic, she runs an NGO, Soulfree, to help people with spinal cord injuries and sets an example for them by the way she lives her own life. Referring to her journey of recovery, she says, “Initially I was upset. But my father became my motivation. He told me that I was more than just my body; that all of us are meant to lose our bodies at some point and that I should strive to think beyond it. But in 2011, out of the blue, my father passed away after a heart attack. A couple of days later, my mother too had a minor heart attack and went through a quintuple bypass surgery, making it impossible for her to do any sort of strenuous activity. This is when it hit me. I have to be on my own someday and there is not even one rehabilitation centre for the disabled in India. So, my mother motivated me to start an NGO to provide support and shelter to those like me. Around the same time, two paraplegic women I knew, unable to live through being told they were a burden and that they didn’t deserve to live, ended their life consuming poison. Mine is a small world. So, if people were dying even in this small world of mine because of disability, then I wondered how many more went through the same fate all around the country. Spinal cord injury is not as rare a condition as many imagine. There is one recorded case of spinal cord injury every 38 minutes. Yet, India does not even recognise spinal cord injuries as a specific multiple disability. In a country with a population of more than a billion, nobody cares about the lives of a few hundred thousand disabled people.”

Soulfree aims at tackling this issue by providing a home for quadriplegics and paraplegics who wish to live independently, making available skilled and qualified doctors and physiotherapists on call, and providing skills training to help them get employment. She also raises awareness about spinal cord injuries and their prevention among youngsters. 

“Considering that this organisation was started by a quadriplegic, on her own, the things we have achieved and the level we have reached is miraculous. We have helped over a 100 people lead a dignified independent life. We inspired the TN government to donate free wheelchairs, that are usable by people with spinal cord injuries. We have successfully created awareness about making public spaces wheelchair accessible. But we still have a long way to go. People invite me to speak at events, but when I get there, the stage is not wheelchair accessible. They want to carry me on stage like I was some circus oddity and this is despite me being the chief-guest. Similarly, many malls and hotels claim to be wheelchair accessible. But their theatres and pool chairs are not. So, this accessibility is provided to us only on a selective basis and they do it out of some half-informed perception, rather than a proper drive to make our lives easier. This has to change,” she emphasises, before she signs off.