Vanishree Venugopal, a core group member of the forum for autism in Mumbai, was born and brought up in Chennai. Her father Subramanian worked for a private firm while her mother Kamakshi is a homemaker. She has an elder sister Rajashree.
As her family lived in Royapuram, it was only natural that Vani schooled at St. Kevins Anglo Indian Higher Secondary School. She completed her higher secondary education in St. Columbans Anglo Indian Higher Secondary School and joined Bharathi Women’s College where she pursued BSc in Physics.
After completing her education, she worked in a private concern. Marriage to Venugopal from the IT sector, took her to Mumbai. Life was moving smoothly for Vani till her only daughter Pushkalaa was diagnosed with autism at the age of 18 months. Though she wanted to take up a job, she had to sacrifice her career to take care of her daughter and soon became adept at multi tasking.
She enrolled Pushkalaa in a special school and had to travel long distances after school to different therapy centres. Vani took up a job in the same school where she gained hands on experience on how to handle special children. She used these same techniques at home to take care of her daughter.
Due to Pushkalaa’s erratic sleep cycle, Vani has to stay up late nights and at times sleep only in the wee hours of the morning.
Vani is an autism ambassador and is part of autism awareness groups where she tries to spread acceptance, awareness and inclusion of the neurodivergent through story telling on many social media platforms. She is grateful to Spectrum, the Awareness Project team for including her in it.
Her love for writing blogs, short stories and poems made her become a member of the Maharashtra Tamil writer’s association where she is a regular contributor. Her short story in Tamil was published in the 25th anniversary souvenir of the association in 2024. She is a regular program host, singer and speaker in this association. She also shares her poems and short stories on various social media platforms.
Vani also likes to sing and she joined the Mumbai Tamizh Sangam. Here, she found a medium to unleash her creativity. She sings, speaks and even takes part in rangoli competitions held at the Sangam. To improvise her singing skills, she tried out apps like smule and slowly moved on to professional singing and got to perform on various platforms.
Her ‘ME’ time is spent doing drawing and painting and Vani realized that it helps her to relax and cope better.
With her husband’s support, she started a small catering unit during the Covid-19 period and whipped up simple meals to cater to senior citizens in the neighbourhood. This later on became a regular source of income.
Nowadays, she also takes up catering orders for birthday parties where she supplies authentic South Indian dishes like idli sambar, masala dosa, vada, poori potato etc. These food items are a big hit with the Mumbai crowd as the taste is very different from the local cuisine.
Cooking is another passion of hers and she loves to try out new, healthy recipes. Her daughter is on Ayurvedic medicine hence there are a lot of food restrictions for her. Hence Vani is always experimenting with new recipes and gets to prepare simple and nutritious vegetarian food.
Being a positive and optimistic person who takes life in its stride, she tries out her hand at many things. For instance, she conducts games for birthday parties, kitty parties and even for wedding events.
Gardening is another hobby of hers and she maintains a small kitchen garden in her ground floor flat.
She makes it a point to go for evening walks or visit temples along with her daughter. Though she does not go to theatres to watch movies, she watches TV serials and listens to music. In fact her daughter too likes listening to music.
Though raising an autistic daughter presents unique challenges for Vani, she has coped well. Her positive attitude and effective parenting techniques have made a big difference.
Juliana Sridhar is a lawyer and columnist
