It must’ve been a man, I thought, as the hand that gripped the cuff of my full-sleeve shirt was rough and indelicate.

It also didn’t seem like an effort to help.

Of course, I was walking on a busy sidewalk to pay my internet bills and probably stop by the tea shop for my favourite cardamom tea. And I had the tendency to stray to the edge of the footpath and get precariously close to falling over the iron fencing among the autorickshaws, hurrying bikes and cars.

“Yes,” I asked him in a disturbed voice, almost believing that it must be a mugger or a theif of some kind, wetting my lips and turning my head on the sideways to observe if I could call someone for help.

“You’re an inspiration.”

the man’s voice was gruffy like the texture of his palm, but I noticed his grip significantly relaxing when he said those words. That, however, didn’t make it any less confusion.

“What do you mean? Do you know me before?” I asked him.

“No,” he admitted. “I’ve seen you before so many times along these same footpaths. I’ve a shop right at the corner. But I wondered how you managed to walk almost daily along the footpath and find your way around.”

I told him that the path is so familiar that I could sleepwalk to the internet shop on top of my blindness. And that someone in my condition manages to find their way because that’s how we prefer to live.

“But still, you’re an inspiration. You don’t complain about your blindness!”

I wanted to ask him if he ever complains about his challenges in life and realized he probably did and that could be one reason why he stopped me.

This happened before 2014, when Australian disability activist Stella Young delivered that famous TED talk and identified the characterization of disability as “inspiration porn”.

It may seem well-meaning, but characterizing what is a day-to-day functioning of a disabled person as extraordinary is a form of objectification of their life –as if to treat them as sources of motivation and upliftment for able-bodied people. Much like deriving pleasure or gratification from watching eroticism, people watch disabled people going about their normal activities to derive motivation or positivity.

This’s trouble some in three important ways:

1, it’s a myth that we’re daunted or overwhelmed by our challenges.

As Young points out in her TED talk, what makes us feel limited in the sense of disability is the badly designed environment that accentuates what we don’t have instead of what we do. Rather than identifying the bad design, people point at us as not being able to function.

The almost universal truth is that planners, designers and architects of infrastructure and technology systems don’t create spaces with disability in mind. Most of the times, accessibility features are retrofitted as an after-thought either for compliance reasons or to mollify people with disability threatening protest or talk about it in the media.

2, While inspiration by itself may not be negative, people expect us to inspire or motivate, do very little to empower us.

This’s because they have very low expectations of us. As if it’s extraordinary that someone like me even walk on my own. If they’re truly “inspired”, they just have to recognize that disability isn’t diminished intelligence and with right tools and technology, we can lead a dignified life like any other human being.

True support is in removing obstacles in getting education, employment and accessing services. Low expectation, in fact, is an obstacle for people to create accessible ecosystem for those like me to survive.

3, most people don’t understand that we don’t “overcome” disability. If you take disability out of the equation, you’ll realise that we face challenges just like any other human being although it could seem steeper due to unfriendly environments in which we function.

Disability is neither desirable or undesirable. God or nature has designed us the way we are and most of us have accepted it and moved on.

But it has become usual for able-bodied people to think that we find our conditions undesirable and we brood over it. Therefore, most people with disability find the idea of someone emotionally moved by them or “inspired” by them as repulsive. They see it as an obstacle to leading a normal life.

But even today, as technology continues to empower people with disability, very few among the mainstream of the society understand the irony of what they consider “inspiring” and the mental blocks that prevent them from creating a functionable ecosystem.

*Today (Tuesday December 21) I’m holding a discussion on Clubhouse social audio app on the same subject. The room is scheduled at 9 pm Indian Time, 11.30 am EST, or 15.30 GMT. Use the below link to join:

https://www.clubhouse.com/join/disability-dialogue/uODQkDFV/PrkNGgoR