What’s disability? Is it an individual’s problem or is it about a society’s inability to ‘adjust to the needs and aspirations of citizens with disabilities’? Ananya traces the roots of the practice of viewing the disabled as either irrelevant or abnormal to ancient cultural norms reinforced by scriptural texts:

Let us see how the great epic The Mahabharata treats their disabled brethren. Dhrtarastra ,the helpless blind king is universally condemned for his blind faith in his son ,his warped sense of justice in regard to Pandavas, his lack of rational discrimination and being too feeble to exert himself, all of which led to the nemesis of all his near and dears ,about thousands of them following a prolonged bloody war . A related character Shakuni, limping since birth, took the vow to destroy his own nephew, in the garb of a friend. Duryodhan confided in him, ultimately at his peril. It flies in the face of common sense that a cunning, mischievous person had to be ascribed with some physical deformity, to reinforce the presupposition of the writer and his readers, to their delight. Nevertheless without any overt physical disability, the character of sikhandi (a transsexual) is used differently, as a pawn to kill Dronacharya .