THE MATTER OF A DIFFERENT MIND

From a car rally and Insta comics to gifting Naina dolls to little girls across Europe, Gurugram's Pooja Sharma is spreading awareness about intellectual disabilities through her collective. Inclusivity does not need grand gestures, she says.

- ALEXANDER SEBASTIAN

DL 8CBF 2666. A car with a Delhi number plate is cruising through the serene countryside and bustling cities of Europe. One day it is parked somewhere in Munich, on another, it is riding through Georgia's capital Tbilisi. A wonderfully cheeky sticker in Hindi reads: "Hans mat pagle, pyar ho jayega" (Don't laugh, idiot, you'll fall in love). Its passengers are three middle-aged women from Delhi, who are having a Zindagi-Na-MilegiDobara moment-but they are on a mission..

Pooja Sharma from Gurugram, along with two of her friends, signed up for the Mongol Rally, an international car rally across 30 countries, in July this year. For Sharma, 43, it was a road trip long postponed, but now she was here for a cause. Sharma founded The Sarvodya Collective, a nonprofit organisation that works towards building "informed, enabling and inclusive" communities around persons with intellectual and developmental disabilities (PwIDD), in 2021. Apart from the "Indian bumper sticker", as she calls it, the blue-grey car is spotted with stickers of the organisation's message to the world, about joining hands to make it a "neuro-inclusive" place, an "#InclusiveDuniya".

The collective aims to address the lack of resources, funding and engagement in the neuro-divergent space. The rally across Europe was a part of this larger awareness project, with Sharma meeting with various organisations and individuals working in the area of neuro-divergence across countries, developments of which were streamed through and posted on the organisation's Instagram page.