Skip to main content

BLIND YET 'WATCHING ' TV

Image
By

Children of Navjyoti School for the blind, located in Mohanlalganj love “watching” soap serials on TV. “They  follow the family dramas and all that is happening in the country by listening to the voices on TV and “picturing” the characters in their minds”, says Sister Jessy,  principal of the school that houses 65 blind children aged 6 to 14 years.
And if your eyes turn moist with sadness for these “deprived” children, just hold on! They do not feel deprived as they do not know what they miss by way of vision, as they never had it. The term for them is neither “deprived” nor “handicapped”, but “challenged”, indicating that their inability to see poses a challenge for them to achieve almost all that their “visually eqipped” colleagues can. They can sing, dance, play on the swings, study, pass exams and get jobs. The way they appreciate beauty may however be somewhat different: Shreya Ghoshal may be more beautiful to them than Karina Kapoor, as it is through voice and  that they perceive the world.
I was amazed to see these children put up a group dance in which they came together at times with their outstreched swinging hands meeting that of their partnersin perfect harmony; so strong is their spatial sense that they could almost “see” where the partner’s hand was at that moment. They also put up a play where their lack of vision made no dent to how they moved around on the stage, faced each other and acted their parts!
Suman showed me how she reads and writes without any vision. Her books and notes are in Brail, a form in which the paper is perforated or elevated in patterns so that alphabets and numbers can be recognized by touching with her fingers. The school also has computers equipped with software that converts the alphabets that we recognize by their 2-dimensional shapes into Brail forms
Blindness afflicts 1.5% of our population making India the country with the largest number of blind people (15 million) of the gliobally estimated 37 million. Lack of vision in children may be of several types. Some have it at birth and then lose it due to damage to their corneas, commonly due to deficiency of Vitamin A, or they may have very high refractive errors like myopia, while some may be blind from birth, as most children in this school are. They have perfectly normal intelligence, and a much enhanced sense of touch and sound.
The children of Navjyoti love music; they sing very well and are very fond of learning the sitar or the drum. And what touched me most was to see that they could laugh and play, and be happy, putting many long faced people with “sights” to shame. A vist to this school taught me much about life.
As published in HT City ( Hindustan Times) dated 6 september, 2009.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How do you like your Tea?

By
The way we drink our tea may not only reflect our taste and style, but our health as well. Tea drinking is around 4700 years old and had its origin in China. Leaves of the shrub Camellia sinensis (tea plant) were in use at that time as a remedy for wounds and diseases. With the legendary emperor Shenong brewing and drinking its extracts, tea drinking became a popular habit in this part of the world. The British, impressed with the brew and the customs that go with drinking it in China and Japan, tried to emulate and evolve a tea-drinking custom of their own, and soon “tea-time”became a familiar term across the globe. Every home or cafe seems to have its own flavour. The north Indian variety of “chay” is a glass of hot creamy milk (more cream as it gets more “special”) with lots of sugar and a lacing of  “tea liquor” of strong tea that grows on lower heights (Assam, Nilgiri, Sri Lanka etc). In contrast, the Chinese and Japanese prefer light green or jasmine tea without a drop of mi...
Post a Comment
Read more

Food Fads in Liver Disorders

By
In an attempt at trying to do well to those they love, spouses and parents often enforce diets on patients of liver diseases that often turn out to be detrimental. The commonest food fad is pale insipid boiled cabbage being doled out to nauseous patients suffering from hepatitis that makes them puke even more.  The liver, in a way, is a buzzing manufacturing unit that requires lots of energy to keep its multiple functions going. And it derives all this from the food we eat. During disease, such as during an attack of jaundice, when many of the liver cells get killed, the liver attemptsdamage control by trying to regenerate quickly. For its cells to multiply however, it requires a generous supply of energy that comes from carbohydrates, and protein, the building block for its cells and tissues. Boiled green vegetables unfortunately have neither of these. Hence the situation often progresses to that of a starved liver unable to recuperate due to cut-off food suppl...
2 comments
Read more

Colas have No Class

By
Cola drinks, once a symbol of American upmarket style, is now to be found perched mainly on the shelves of road-side ‘paan walas’ and local grocers. True, there still are Americans who drink more colas than water, and consume an average of 2 bottles per day of the tangy fizzy dark drink, but it has clearly fallen in stature as offering it to visitors or serving it at parties is no longer elegant. Premiere schools in Lucknow such as La Martiniere College for girls have shunned colas from their canteen for the last 4 years. The story started with extensive campaigns by HOPE Initiative (Health Oriented Programs and Education) in 2005 creating awareness among the bright students about the long term harms of cola drinks. A heated debate followed in which the rights of an individual student  was pitched against the hazards of allowing gullible youngsters to be enticed by aggressive marketing to gulp colas and fall sick. The intelligent and alert La Marts students dcided on ...
Post a Comment
Read more