A little man with a large heart: Thiruvananthapuram

No limb of Britto Anthony is unimpaired. Britto, who stays at the Cheshire Home in Thiruvananthapuram, is forty nine years old and weighs only thirteen kg. with a height of fifteen inches. He is deaf, has two short stumps for legs, his speech is incoherent and sight extremely weak. He wears thick spectacles and operates a wheel chair all by himself.

He is a bundle of energy and can match any able bodied adult in intellect and knowledge. Reading, writing and lobbying for the cause of children and the disabled people are his main activities. His decorum is just like any normal person’s and he expects others to deal with him similarly. He knows four languages – learnt through dictionaries and grammar books – and is now learning Danish.

Britto was born with brittle bones disease, and is one of the ten children of a newspaper agent in Kollam district. His normal siblings left him in the Cheshire Home in 1979.

He was initially depressed but soon started reading and writing, helping the Home in its correspondence and editing the Cheshire Home magazine. He has thought of marriage but does not appear to believe in love. He recommends reading Gita and discloses that the secret of happiness is accepting life as it is.

Source: The Voice,
Issue: Jan-June, 1996