BLIND YET 'WATCHING ' TV

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 sounds 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.