Nearly twenty-three years have passed, yet Bengaluru-based Mudita Khimji remembers that moment with piercing clarity. “When the doctors told us our daughter had Down syndrome, everything went still. My initial feelings were fear and uncertainty—I didn’t know what her future would look like, or if the world would be kind to her,” she recalls. “There was grief, not because of her, but because of all the assumptions I’d unknowingly held about parenthood. That moment shattered them—and opened me up to something deeper,” Khimji recounts.

Down syndrome is a genetic condition where a child is born with an extra copy of chromosome 21, altering physical and cognitive development. People with Down syndrome are neurodivergent, meaning they may think, learn, and interact differently from neurotypical

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