Your child is not difficult.
Your child may be gifted.

I live in a house full of gifted minds — and it took me years to truly understand what I was looking at. A son who disappears so deeply into his own thoughts that I can call his name three times before he hears me. A daughter who cannot bear the tag inside her clothes, yet remembers a page she saw once as if she photographed it. A husband who vanishes for hours into learning and writing, chasing an idea. For a long time the world had one word for all of this: difficult. I have learned it is the wrong word.

A house of beautiful, different minds

Let me introduce you to the three people who taught me everything I now know about giftedness. All three have a remarkably high intelligence — and the strangest, most beautiful thing is this: when I watch them work, each of them is completely different, and yet somehow so alike. The same fierce focus, the same hunger, the same faraway look when a mind is fully lit up.

None of this is misbehaviour or drama. Sensory sensitivity is real neurology — a gifted child who cannot bear a clothing tag is not being fussy; their nervous system is genuinely processing the world at a higher intensity. Getting lost in thought is not inattention; it is a mind running deep. Understanding this changed how I mother, how I love, and eventually, what our family decided to build.

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The moment it all made sense

The turning point came through my husband. At 47, Kunwer — the entrepreneur many know as the “Inverter Man of India” — read a book about gifted grown-ups and, for the first time in his life, felt seen. The relentless curiosity, the patterns he saw that others missed, the inner critic that never rested. Not quirks. A differently wired brain. You can read his full, honest account in the GiftedKids.in founding story.

And then the obvious, humbling thought: if a man could build an entire industry and still not have the word for himself until 47 — what about our children? What about the millions of Indian children sitting in classrooms right now being called lazy, distracted, or “too much,” when they are simply gifted and unseen?

The topper is not always the gifted child

This is the distinction that changed everything for me. In India we confuse high marks with giftedness — but they are different things. The bright child gives the right answers; the gifted child asks the questions no one expected. One absorbs the lesson; the other was already three steps ahead and is now bored.

Why our family built GiftedKids.in

So we built the thing we wished had existed when our own children were small. GiftedKids.in is India’s first platform dedicated to identifying, nurturing and advocating for gifted children — built for Indian realities, not imported Western frameworks. I co-founded it with my husband Kunwer Sachdev and with Dr. Inderbir Kaur Sandhu, who holds a Cambridge PhD in gifted education and has worked with high-ability children since 1996.

The platform stands on four simple pillars:

• Identification — India’s first observation-based framework, so parents and teachers can recognise giftedness without expensive IQ tests. See the identification guide →
• Advocacy — template letters, meeting scripts and know-your-rights guides to support your child inside a rigid school system. For parents →
• Resources — scholarships, Olympiads, mentors and programmes mapped by age, language and location. Find resources →
• Community & articles — parents, teachers and gifted adults, writing from inside the Indian reality. For teachers →

What I want every parent to know

If you are calling your child’s name and getting no answer, if your child melts down over a seam or a sound, if teachers keep saying “bright, but needs to apply himself” — please do not reach for the word difficult. Look again. There may be a gifted, sensitive, extraordinary mind in front of you, waiting to be understood rather than corrected.

I write this as a mother first — a mother of two children who taught me to see differently, and a wife to a man who found himself at 47. No child should have to wait that long to be seen. That is the whole reason GiftedKids.in exists.

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Explore further

• GiftedKids.in — India’s first gifted-education platform
• Understand giftedness & the identification framework
• The founding story — “I discovered I was gifted at 47”
• Dr. Inderbir Kaur Sandhu — our co-founder and gifted-education specialist
• Twice-exceptional children — giftedness alongside sensory or learning differences