In 1952, after two weeks of typhoid fever and the mumps, 11-year-old Madan Vasishta awoke one night to discover that he could no longer hear. He was horrified because in India, the word for deaf in all three main languages, Punjabi, Urdu, and Hindi, denoted someone who was not really human. But he was young, brash, and irrepressible, and his autobiography Deaf in Delhi: A Memoir reveals how his boundless optimism enabled him to persist and prevail.
Vasishta s story reflects the India of his youth, an emerging nation where most people struggled with numbing poverty and depended upon...