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At 14, considered nonverbal and severely intellectually disabled; at 19, admitted to MIT [1]

['Ruben Bolling']

Date: 2025-09-03

For the first fourteen years of his life, Viraj Dhanda, who has autism and apraxia, was non-verbal, non-communicative, and assumed to be intellectually disabled.

It wasn't until his father, Sumit, experimented with various communication and keyboard devices that Viraj could work with one part of his body with which he had sufficient dexterity — his right thumb — that he discovered that his son was far from intellectually disabled. He was brilliant.

From an article on WBUR.org:

Viraj Dhanda started using the communication device to request his favorite TV shows, then a breakthrough came right before his 13th birthday when he was watching a show called "Super Why!," where animated characters spell out words. In this episode, the word was 'waterfall.' "Before it gets spelled on the screen by the superhero, he says the letters that he can — A-T-E-R — and then a light bulb goes on in me," Sumit Dhanda said. "Oh my God. We had this entirely misdiagnosed." Viraj Dhanda remembers that moment too. He said he was trying to send a message to his father.

Viraj recalls:

"I hated being labeled mentally disabled. People thought I was behavioral because I flopped on the floor, used my body to communicate, but what was I supposed to do?" Viraj Dhanda said. "I couldn't sign or speak, and I was desperate for the world to know that I had a fully functional brain."

Sumit then used a large letter board on which Viraj could point to individual letters to spell out what he wanted to say. Then he found smaller keyboard devices that Viraj could use.

Then, in less than three years, Viraj went from learning basic math to calculus. Viraj said, in an interview with the CBS Evening News (below) about getting into MIT: "I was ecstatic. Getting into MIT didn't just feel like a personal victory for me, but a breakthrough for the entire non-speaking autistic non-speaking community."

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[1] Url: https://boingboing.net/2025/09/03/at-14-considered-nonverbal-and-severely-intellectually-disabled-at-19-admitted-to-mit.html

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