Episode 9: In Talks with Divyanshu Ganatra

Recorded On 12^th May, 2026
In this episode, Divyanshu Ganatra, clinical psychologist, cognitive neuroscientist, India’s first blind solo paraglider, and founder of Adventures Beyond Barriers Foundation - sits down with Vidya to trace a life that pivoted overnight at nineteen, when he woke up completely blind. From a glaucoma diagnosis delivered in a single sentence, to a self-taught career in technology, a psychology degree earned against the resistance of the education system, and a foundation that uses adventure sport to dissolve the invisibility of disability in India.

The conversation moves through all five Es. Parents, he calls his biggest role models. An elder sister who turned him into her captive student. A Pune childhood, as he puts it, with plenty of imagination and a neighbourhood where you could walk into anybody’s house. Two inborn traits, he says, carried him through everything that came next: a curiosity that made him peek under rocks, and a stubbornness he has learned to reframe as persistence.

He taught himself technology with a friend reading the screen aloud; he skipped Braille because he wanted access to a million books, not a few. He went back to college, moved out of the parental home at twenty to learn to be independent. His rule, through every fight, was that the disability would never be brought to the table as an excuse, even if it meant working four times as hard. From his clinical practice - where clients felt unusually free with a psychologist who could not recognise them outside the room - came his most economical reframe: stop chasing happiness and learn instead how to be less upset with yourself.

The episode closes on equality of opportunity. India, Divyanshu reminds Vidya, is the blind capital of the world - forty million people, roughly half of them with conditions that are medically reversible if only the access and the money existed. He walks through the Help a Child Walk programme, where 1,200 children are currently on a waitlist whose intervention window closes as each child grows, and ? 30,000 is enough to change a life.
To download the episode transcript, click here