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“Where order meets whimsy – love that embraces our disabilities”

Himanshi Sardana (32) from New Delhi started Decode Disability, a Facebook page, in 2020 as a reaction to her experiences in academics and job hunting. Born with cerebral palsy (CP), she wanted to create a platform to advocate for accessible workplaces and start conversations over disability. She didn’t expect the platform to draw the attention of someone who would become her life partner!
 
Rewant Katyal (31) came across Decode Disability in 2021 while doing a pilot project for People Matters, a community for HR professionals. He was the first Person with Disability (PwD) the company had hired and they wanted him to build a team that would include more PwDs. Himanshi’s and Rewant’s professional relationship turned personal when they realised how much they had in common.
 
Himanshi grew up in “a typical Punjabi joint family where the home is filled with endless love, laughter, feasts”. They didn’t hold her back and encouraged her to do whatever she could. “Most kids don’t like visiting the doctors but I loved my physiotherapy sessions!” she remembers. “The doctors there [at the Pandit Deendayal Upadhyaya National Institute for Persons with Physical Disabilities] made it so much fun, playing games and pampering me with candy. There I was not different, I was like everybody else.”
 
School was not the same, however. She stood out among the other children because she walks differently and wore orthopaedic shoes. Nobody around her knew what CP was. In Class 4, the entire class except her were given roles in a Ram Leela pageant and when her mother tried to convince the teacher to include her, the teacher agreed to let her be part of the singing troupe. “But I did not want to sing,” says Himanshi. “For my teacher, by allowing me to sing she was checking a box. But inclusion is not a checkbox.”
 
College was where her differences showed up starkly. She graduated from the Shaheed Sukhdev College of Business Studies, where many companies came to hire fresh graduates. Himanshi would clear all the rounds except the final, face-to-face round. During her first interview she was taken aback when the company representative bluntly asked, “Do you have a polio leg?” She realised that all the interviewers felt uncomfortable around her disability. She decided to switch streams and do her Masters in Social Work from Delhi University. “MSW gave me the tools to make a difference,” she says. “It made me more confident and vocal about my disability.”
 
Today she works for Human Factor as the D&I HR specialist. She joined in April 2024 and Rewant, five months later, as an accessibility specialist. Human Factor provides consulting services to organisations for disability inclusion with respect to recruitment, training and sensitisation programmes and infrastructure accessibility audit with solutioning.  Rewant provides HR consulting for the company’s clients and is developing a service line for the B2C market focussed on disability inclusion. He is also doing a certificate course to become an accredited accessibility auditor.
 
When Rewant was in kindergarten his teachers noticed his unsteady gait and informed his parents who took him for medical check-ups. “The two main diagnoses to date have been spinal muscular atrophy and hereditary motor and sensory neuropathy,” he says. With regular physiotherapy he could walk but an accident in ninth grade confined him to bed for a year, after which he started using a wheelchair. “It took me a few months to get used to this new phase of my life,” he says. “My family supported me throughout and helped create a positive outlook in me. Every setback made me stronger.” He also developed the mental strength to deal with emotional strife when, between 2012 and 2017, he lost his maternal and paternal grandparents, and then his mother.  
 
Even as a teenager, Rewant had a strong urge to be independent. One day when he was in Class 10 he went out in his wheelchair with his friends to a movie. He told his mother he would return on his own but she insisted on picking him up. He was furious. Once they reached home he sat his parents down and firmly told them to treat him no different from his older sisters. “They gave me the freedom to make my own decisions even at that age,” he narrates. “If they hadn’t I might never have been independent and taken charge of my own life.” A cricket enthusiast, Rewant used to play for the Delhi Wheelchair Cricket team in twelfth grade but as his motor skills deteriorated he could no longer play. He chose to study Human Resource Management in which he did his MBA from the Delhi School of Economics. He joined a startup and then, People Matters.
 
Himanshi not only vibed beautifully with him but also staunchly stuck to her decision to marry him. When her family wanted to know about Rewant’s background she began by describing his good job, his good family… and finally saying he used a wheelchair. They were bewildered by how they together were going to manage various experiences and aspects of life. But slowly she coaxed them to observe his life first-hand. A lunch date with him impressed them a lot; they saw how worldly wise he was, how he had picked the right restaurant and came on his own in his customised car.
 
Even before the couple tied the knot on 15 November 2024, they went on a holiday together to Kasauli, taking along a helper, just to test the practical aspects of their future lives together. Now their typical weekend is spending time outdoors, with Rewant chalking out the schedule since he is a meticulous planner. “He makes Excel sheets for everything, even when we travel on holiday!” Himanshi says with a laugh. “We recently went to Singapore and he had everything noted down to a tee.” Life, for the couple, is about “exploring with curiosity and finding joy in making spaces more accessible.” Meanwhile Himanshi’s Decode Disability page is growing organically. “It encourages me that this page is fulfilling a need,” she says. Who knows whether it will generate yet another ‘disability’ love story!