She is a Facebook addict. She has an itch to communicate with the world. She loved JFK’s biography and has a weakness for romantic novels. She sobs as she watches dreamy love stories. Ask her what’s her poison, “Red wine,” pat comes her reply.

So what if doctors in India brusquely told the parents of this infant — who “remained passive”, “got terrified by noises”, didn’t sit up, or roll over, or kick her legs like other babies — that she would be a vegetable and nothing could be done for her? Her parents refused to believe them and didn’t give up believing in her.
Mumbai-based, 44-year-old Malini Chib too believed in herself and has chronicled her life in her recently released autobiography One Little Finger to let people know that having to live with cerebral palsy has only made her positive about life.
The ninth line of the opening chapter concisely narrates her tale of survival as:
The birth was hugely traumatic, and the pediatrician in charge kept repeating to himself ‘it was a mistake, I should have carried out a caesarean … let’s see if she survives… I am not sure if she will survive… at the most 72 hours. I survived.
Malini resorted to the mighty little finger — as the title suggests — to type around 50,000 words to take her story forward from here. She says, “During birth, I got suffocated while trying to come out of my mother’s womb and the lack of oxygen damaged my brain. It was a tough time for my young parents. The doctors told them that the damage to my brain was irreversible. But my parents were fighters. When they heard that England has some hope for me, they were soon on a mission. Even if that meant that they had to wind up their life in India, they took me to England for treatment.”
Malini always had a writer in her. She was consistently writing snippets for her book, short stories with the sole purpose of communicating with others and to have people know how she became an adult and what does independence mean to her.
Four years ago, she joined Facebook to fill that interaction gap and today with over 600 people on her friends’ list, she can’t stop smiling.
“The transition from childhood to adulthood had not been easy. Apart from my own struggle to speak and feel normal, I had to fight the apathy and indifference of people. My initial years of the five years spent at Xavier’s College, Mumbai were no different either. People were unfriendly and I soon began to notice that I had limitations. But eventually some came out of their callous shell and I made a few friends for life,” she says.
She describes her life as a journey and shuttles between India and UK, where one fills in for the other in terms for facilities and emotional support. With two Masters degrees in her kitty, Malini works as a senior events manager at Oxford Bookstore, Mumbai.
“The facilities available in the UK helped me pursue higher studies and provided me the independence and freedom that India surely lacked. The government in India should put efforts to make offices, restaurants, libraries, shopping malls and public transport more disabled-friendly. They can’t go out as the roads are not exactly accessible. Disabled people have every right to be out in the open. We need to be heard and understood. We are normal,” adds Malini.
Malini ends the book with a hope to rise upto the struggle and challenge of doing so against the demon of apathy and rejection and with a belief that there will be a better tomorrow for her.