The Elevator Pitch

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My Sustainable Encounter with Suvarna Raj

by Albert Schiller

The Weight around Your Neck

You see a para-athlete on television, a gold medal around their neck. You feel a surge of inspiration, a sense of awe at their undeniable willpower. Your feelings are not part of their solution. For celebrated para-athlete and advocate Suvarna Raj, your moment of inspiration comes with a lifetime of blood and tears, and perseverance. She is a master of inspirational storytelling, but she is also her own sharpest critic. She identifies the "superhuman" narrative as a "double-edged sword." While it amplified her voice and forced change, it also created a dangerous illusion, presenting disability as a personal challenge to be overcome rather than a social issue to be solved through systemic inclusion and a paradigm of belonging. Her critique of the superhuman narrative deconstructs this paradox. What happens when our most inspiring stories become the very barrier to a barrier-free India?

Defeating Inertia

The first edge of the sword is its undeniable might. Suvarna Raj is not an idealist who rejects the system wholesale just because. As a pragmatist, she learned to leverage within its limited margins. She is clear that the media has been a crucial partner in her advocacy. When a lone voice speaks out against a fortress of indifference, it remains a feeble expression with honourable intent. However, media coverage can turn a voice into a national conversation, transforming a personal struggle into a matter of public concern. From inaccessible training camps to the lack of accessible elections, journalists have provided the amplifier that has forced policy changes and brought a new level of accountability to indifferent institutions across India. For Suvarna, the media is not an enemy. It is a powerful, if sometimes orchestrated, instrument for justice. An inspirational narrative, in this context, serves a vital function. It captures the public's attention, creating pressure to move a stubborn system beyond consistent inertia. It is the tactical first step in a much longer war.

The Broken Ramp

The other edge of the sword is sharper and more insidious. The "superhuman" narrative creates what Suvarna calls a "comfortable distance." It places the para-athlete on a pedestal, turning them into an object of admiration or awe. This allows society to applaud the individual triumph while conveniently ignoring its own collective failure as such. We are inspired by the athlete who wins a medal, but, as Suvarna points out, we are not compelled enough to fix the broken ramp at the local post office. The public celebration of the few does not let us off the hook for all. It focuses on the extraordinary person who breaks through the barrier to shine at an event, rather than asking the more difficult question of why the barrier exists in the first place. This is the curse of the superhuman. We celebrate the exception so we do not have to fix the rule. It allows us to feel good about a single person's unlikely achievement without doing the inconvenient work of building a ramp where it is needed.

Owning Your Actions

The final lesson from Suvarna’s critique is a direct call to shift the narrative. Actual progress, she argues, is not measured in medals on a dramatic stage. It is measured by whether a person with a disability can live a life of everyday independence and dignity. Therefore, the media's most important role is not only to celebrate victories in stadiums, but to investigate exclusion from train stations, airports, and polling stations. The goal is to move the public consciousness from a state of passive "pity or awe to a demand for justice and accessibility for all." This is a strategic reframing. It asks us, as consumers of stories, to stop using narratives of disability as a source of personal inspiration and to start engaging in systemic change. It is a demand to stop applauding the superhuman and begin building an India where dignity is not an extraordinary achievement, but a human right for everyone.

So what can we take from her approach?

Questions for Audience

1. As leaders, how can we tell compelling, human stories that motivate our teams and stakeholders without accidentally creating a "superhuman" narrative that lionizes individual heroics and obscures underlying systemic problems?

2. In our own lives, where do we consume "inspirational" stories (of athletes, entrepreneurs, etc.) as a substitute for action, allowing their extraordinary success to become a comfortable reason for our own inaction?