Does disability really needs fixing?

What If I Don’t Want to Be Fixed?

A few days ago, I visited the Buddha Temple in Hyderabad with my sister, brother-in-law, nephew, and some family friends.

It was one of those evenings that stay with you. The weather was beautiful, a gentle breeze filled the air, and from the top we could see the city stretching endlessly below us. For a while, we simply sat there, enjoying the view and the peace that surrounded us.

As we were about to leave, a monk approached us. Very politely, he asked my sister—not me—whether we could stay for the evening prayer because, he explained gently, it had healing powers.

I wasn’t offended.

I wasn’t angry.

I was simply… uncomfortable.

Not because someone invited me to pray. I deeply respect that people find strength, hope, and comfort in their faith. Every person has the right to their own beliefs.

What made me uncomfortable was something else.

It was the assumption that my disability was something that needed healing in the first place.

That evening stayed with me long after we left the temple.

The more I reflected on it, the more I realised that this wasn’t an isolated incident. In one form or another, such moments are a part of the everyday lives of many persons with disabilities.

Years ago, at a family wedding, a gentleman walked up to my mother and suggested that she should write to the Prime Minister because she must be “tired” of taking care of me and needed government support for my care. He never asked me my name. He never asked what I studied, what I enjoyed, or whether I was independent. Before knowing anything about me, he had already decided what my life must look like.

The assumptions were different.

The places were different.

But the message was the same.

Disability was seen as something that needed to be fixed, cured, or taken care of.

These experiences made me pause and ask myself a question:

Why do we so often assume that a person with disability is waiting to be fixed?

Perhaps the answer lies in the way we have learned to see disability.

For a long time, disability has been understood primarily as a problem that exists within the person’s body—a problem that needs treatment, correction, or cure. Medical care certainly has an important place in many people’s lives, but that is not the whole story.

What often makes life more difficult is not disability alone, but the way society responds to it.

A person with visual disability faces barriers when books, websites, and public information are not available in accessible formats.

A person with hearing disability is excluded when important conversations, announcements, or events do not provide sign language interpretation or captions.

A person with an intellectual disability may be left behind when information is unnecessarily complicated instead of being available in Easy Read or other accessible formats.

A person with a learning disability may struggle in an education system that values only one way of learning instead of recognising diverse ways of understanding and expressing knowledge.

A wheelchair user encounters barriers when buildings have only stairs, narrow entrances, or inaccessible washrooms.

The challenge is not always our bodies.

Very often, it is the world that has been designed without us in mind.

Imagine if every book were available in accessible formats from the day it was published.

Imagine if every website was designed to work with assistive technologies.

Imagine if every public announcement included captions and sign language interpretation.

Imagine if information was routinely available in Easy Read and other accessible formats.

Imagine if every school, workplace, public transport system, and public building expected diversity instead of treating accessibility as an exception.

Imagine if ramps, tactile pathways, lifts with audio announcements, accessible washrooms, inclusive classrooms, and reasonable accommodation were simply considered part of good design rather than special provisions.

Would disability still be seen as the problem?

Or would we finally recognise that it was the barriers all along?

Sometimes I wonder what our conversations about disability would sound like if we started from a different assumption.

What if, instead of asking, “Can this person be fixed?”, we asked, “What can we change so this person can participate equally?”

What if accessibility was seen as a responsibility rather than a favour?

What if inclusion was something we designed from the very beginning instead of adding as an afterthought?

As a person with disability, I don’t expect everyone to fully understand my experiences.

But I do hope people begin by seeing me as a person before they see my disability.

I hope they become curious about my life rather than my limitations.

I hope they ask about my aspirations before they assume my struggles.

And most importantly, I hope we begin to recognise that persons with disabilities are not waiting for society to “fix” them.

We are waiting for society to stop treating disability as something that is broken.

Perhaps disability is a part of human diversity, not a flaw that needs to be erased.

Perhaps the real question is not whether persons with disabilities need to be fixed, but whether society is willing to remove the barriers it has created.

Because more often than not, it is those barriers—not disability itself—that prevent persons with disabilities from participating equally in society.