Arun was rushed to a hospital where friends looked after him as he struggled to stay alive. His parents were on a tea estate in Assam where his father was manager, his sister was on a train to Delhi and his brother in Bombay was about to join the Merchant Navy. Arun came out of hospital alive — but as a paraplegic. From that moment the whole family’s life was put on hold and the slow process of ensuring the young man did not suffer too much damage became its full-time occupation. This middle class family was reduced to near penury and a small garage in Defence Colony became their new home.

Recognising that there weren’t too many possibilities of rehabilitation in India, it was decided to send Arun abroad. After much discussion Sweden was chosen as it offered state-of-the-art rehabilitation. Given the weakness of the Indian currency and the exorbitant cost of living in Sweden, every penny hurt and no one was more aware of this than Arun, who, while grappling with his disabled body, was also aware of how his accident had damaged the lives of those around him. He took to rehabilitation like a duck to water, and surprised even the most optimistic of doctors by completing in six months what normally took two years. Very soon he became a rehabilitation instructor at the same institute and, within a few years, felt so confident he started his own software company which prospered well into the late nineties.

As part of his rehabilitation, he took to gym training and was very soon an excellent weightlifter. He represented Sweden in the Bench Press event at the paraplegic Olympics in Atlanta and surprised everyone by winning the gold medal, setting a record not just for the disabled but also for the ‘normal’ Olympics. The environment in Sweden helped and soon the accident in 1983 was a distant memory. Arun was a charged man. For him ‘active rehabilitation’ became a mantra and he was determined to bring his experience in Sweden to help spread its benefits in India.

He started making frequent trips to India and working with institutions to improve the quality of wheelchairs so that paraplegics could be more pro-active with their wheelchairs. He worked on training the bodies of those injured — irrespective of their family backgrounds. His goal is to make the disabled re-discover their inner strength so as to learn to be completely independent again.

The writer is a filmmaker. His last film was ‘Manipur Song’