Eight Billion Ways to Be Human
I was talking to Tatai, my nephew, today. He is a PhD student at Gokhale Institute of Politics and Economics in Pune, India . He’s close to finalizing his thesis proposal and preparing to defend it. We were talking about his study pattern. For him, big ideas come easily, but the details are challenging to concentrate on. It’s a familiar place for me. Midway through, almost casually, he asked if he might have autism . I didn't respond immediately. I'm not a psychologist. Instead, I said something simpler: maybe what you're calling autism is just you. That shifted things. Soon we were discussing neurodivergence —not as a diagnosis, but as a way of acknowledging different ways of thinking. Tatai struggles with details unless they're clearly part of something bigger. He doesn’t fit the picture of someone who sits crunching numbers all day at a keyboard; neither do I. I'm the same way. Whether that's ADHD or something else wasn’t the point. The point was realizing ...