The Better India · 4 hours ago

How a Mother Built Tickle Your Art to Empower Artists with Disabilities

When Dhriti Runwal came home with a diary and pointed to a stick figure crying on the page - her way of saying a friend was moving away - her mother Shweta understood something that no medical chart had shown her: her daughter had been communicating all along. That recognition became the seed of Tickle Your Art, a social enterprise in Mumbai that works with more than 25 neurodiverse artists, turning their original work into products, livelihoods, and quiet proof that creativity does not require permission. "People saw her diagnosis before they saw her," Shweta says of her daughter's early years - and so she built something that reverses that order entirely, letting the art arrive first. There is a particular wisdom in how the organization measures its purpose: every product should generate "three smiles" - the artist's, the giver's, and the receiver's - a philosophy that treats economic inclusion not as charity but as the straightforward recognition that someone's time and talent have worth. Shweta's younger daughter Ira, who has grown up inside this world and now helps shape it, offers perhaps the most clarifying thought of all: she has never had to think about inclusion, because in her life, it has simply always been normal.