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I’ve just finished reading “The Mind Tree: A Miraculous Child Breaks the Silence of Autism” by Tito Rajarshi Mukhopadhyay. Tito was born and raised in India (Mysore and Bangalore). He was diagnosed as being severely autistic when he was three years old. In spite of his diagnosis, his mother Soma was determined to teach her child how to communicate with the outside world. Soma used physical manipulation to teach him basic tasks, i.e. she guided his body through the movements until he could “feel” how his muscles worked. She supervised him in social situations, teaching him what was appropriate in polite company. Throughout Tito’s childhood, the family moved from place to place as his mother consulted with psychologists and doctors. Despite their grim predictions, she believed her son’s ability to live a “normal” life.

Eventually, she taught Tito to “communicate” using an alphabet board. He would point at the letters and she would write down the words. Although he could only speak a few sounds, he was able to write with a pencil in long sentences. Tito wrote two books, “The Voice of Silence” (at eight years old) and “Beyond the Silence” (at eleven years old). Both of these, including some poetry from “Tito’s Story” are brought together in this book, “the mind tree”.

Tito’s writing style is unlike any other I’d read. He always referred to himself in third-person, as “the boy”, “he” and “him”. Tito writes with unabashed honesty about his thoughts and feelings. Several times, he wished he was “a spirit”, someone observing his body from outside. During his endless evaluations by doctors and psychologists, he noted:

“Some people were interested in the boy [Tito] for his distorted behaviour, more interested in the ‘have nots’ rather than the abilities that he had…others, who were a bit sceptical as to ‘how a boy who can’t talk, can calculate or communicate’…[t]he boy wondered about the different thoughts that the people had and behaved accordingly…[t]he boy was still an intelligent junk, not functioning in the useful way (p.31-32).”

He manages to defy those “skeptics” and learn how to calculate and communicate through the written word.

The title of this collection, “the mind tree” describes his view perfectly. A tree has many branches that twist this way and that, some in unexpected directions, while its roots (that keeps the tree alive) is hidden deep within the earth, where no one can see. The mind works in the same way, sometimes in strange but unique ways. I highly recommend this book because it gives us an insight to how an autistic person’s mind works and it can give us ways to help them function in “our” world.

Review of The Mind Tree on autisumvox.com by Kristina Chew, PhD

[tags]parenting, autism, book review, the mind tree, Tito Rajarshi Mukhopadhyay, communication[/tags]