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“Say not what MS has done to you; say what you have done with your MS”

Arun Mohan (51) unfurls his life before you like a carpet weaver displaying an ornate Persian rug he’s designing in real time. He’s weaving the colourful threads of his past into entertaining stories and before you know it, two hours have passed.
 
In 1983 he was a schoolboy at St Mary’s in Delhi (where one of his classmates later married actor Manoj Bajpayee). His class was queuing up to enter the Nehru Planetarium on the grounds of Teen Murti Bhavan when cops hustled them away. Indira Gandhi had just been assassinated. Then in 1991 not long after his family had moved to Chennai, and not too far from where they lived, Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated. Did he bring bad luck to the Gandhi family?
 
“People have told me I look like Sundar Pichai,” he says – and indeed his face is not unlike that of the Google CEO. “He was three years my senior in (Chennai’s) Jawahar Vidyalaya.” From 10th grade through graduation from Guru Nanak College he took up part time jobs demonstrating various products, and then moved towards a full time career in Sales – a natural progression, given his gift of the gab.
 
Sitting in his third floor flat in Bengaluru, Arun vividly describes the highlights of his record-setting career in the many Chennai companies he has worked in: getting high net worth individuals (of the ilk of Tamil actors Goutami and Karthik) to open accounts in Bank of America; securing the biggest client for a large multinational company in a Rs 5 crore deal with the Tamil Nadu government for computer education in all their schools; as the corporate division head of Sodexo, getting all 4,000 Wipro employees and 23,000 HAL employees to buy Sodexo cards; in HFDC, getting 8,000 salary accounts a month for three months…
 
It was a dream run. Could it last? This one didn’t. Arun got his first jolt when his Chennai boss thought he was drunk because he was slurring his speech. “Everyone started thinking I was drunk until finally I started believing it myself!” There was a hellish experience one rainy night when he was forced to crawl 500 metres towards his house. A doctor diagnosed him with Parkinson’s for which he took medicines for six months before a top neurosurgeon asked him to take an MRI in 2014 and found clear evidence of Multiple Sclerosis (MS).
 
“There were five white patches each on my brain, spinal cord and optic nerve, and each patch was a group of lesions,” Arun recalls. “I was taking four injections a month at ₹45,000 each.” In retrospect, he realised that MS had silently announced its presence decades earlier through his poor eyesight. His eye power was minus 3 when he was in third standard and had declined to minus 10 by the time he reached the ninth. He later discovered he suffers from nystagmus, a condition where the eyes make repetitive uncontrolled movements.
 
Arun seems to have shrugged off his diagnosis and faced his future head-on. In 2016 he started using a walking stick “for safety” in case he unwarily bumped into a woman! “Using a walking stick at 40 was a better alternative to being called a drunkard at 20,” he says. After becoming the subject of a photo shoot depicting various symptoms of MS, his photos caught the attention of a fashion show organiser. “I took part in four fashion shows. In one, my partner was a Miss Kerala.”
 
After he and his parents left Chennai he joined the Bangalore chapter of the MS Society of India. Around five years ago the Rotary Club gave him an ‘Unsung Heroes’ award. “The award money was ₹10,000 and so I joined the Club since the membership fee was only ₹2,000 extra,” he jokes. He is the current President of Rotary Bangalore Abilities, the only Rotary Club in the world where most members are Persons with Disabilities (PwDs): of the total 29, 4 have MS, 2 are on the autism spectrum and 20 are Blind or visually impaired.
 
Arun is a motivational coach certified by the International Coaching Federation, but instead of entering the space of the money-spinning ‘life coach’ with super-rich clients, he chose to do what he calls “emotional coaching” for PwDs, especially persons with MS. His silver tongue falls silent as his ears open to the heart-wrenching experiences they recount. “And what they talk about is not even one percent of what they actually go through,” he says.
 
His mobility has deteriorated. “I’ve fallen down five times in the past six months” he says, and his mother Laxmi Mohan (73) adds, with a touch of exasperation, “Always in the bathroom at two or three in the morning.” Laxmi was a beloved teacher at Padma Seshadri in Chennai for 35 years and now does online English coaching for high-school students. Her husband died two years ago of a kidney ailment. Arun walks unassisted indoors (Laxmi can hardly help) and cannot go outdoors unless someone pushes his wheelchair. His favourite place is the little balcony where he sits, morning and evening, to watch the world go by.