Times they are a changing...

Ramakrishna today is General Manager, Finance with IDBI, He is totally blind. He is the first blind person to successfully complete an MBA degree. Geetha Shamana is a German translator working out of Bangalore. Sanjay Dang owns and manages a Rs.1.5 crore Travel Company in Deli. Charudatta Jhadav, a software Engineer is a Project Goup Leader aTata Consultancy Services. Sidhdharth Sharma runs a PR company, while Vikram Dalmia runs his own Industry. Kanchan Pamnani, Kanchan Gaba and Deepak Motivala are thriving lawyers. Sameer Late, Dilip Loyolka and Rajni Gapalakrishnan are CAs doing wonderfully well. To add to this L Subramani, Garimella Subramanium and Rajesh Kumar are journalists with leading Newspapers of the country. These are just a few names of individuals who are doing extremely well in the mainstream and happen to be totally blind.
The last couple of decades have witnessed tremendous changes as far as living with blindness is concerned. In the 1960s and 1970s, educated blind people could aspire to get into the teaching profession or take up music at best When it came to the less educated or the uneducated blind person, they would be lucky if they could sell candles, cane chairs or at best be part of an industrial assembly line.
The opening up of the media in the 1990s, the coming of age of assistive technology for the blind, the increasing opportunities for education for blind persons and the steadily rising recognition of the ability of blind persons slowly but gradually has started opening up a wide range of avenues.
T: Technology
E: Education
A: Ability
M: Media
Indeed a formidable TEAM that promises to put the blind people of this country onto an equal footing. Surely the potential is there and now the TEAM tools are available, what is needed are the inclusive policies, universal designs and a determined and discipline effort on the part of the blind persons.
The 1990s saw the emergence of Personal Computers, Mobile Phones, Scanners and so on and along with it saw the advent of screen readers, OCR software and the internet. This has opened up a whole newn World of Knowledge that has become accessible to the blind persons of the country. This revolutionary access to the World of knowledge has created a vast variety of opportunity both in terms of education and also in terms of employment.
The 1990s also has seen several mainstream schools opening their doors to blind and visually impaired students. Today, in the big cities, inclusive education is catching on where blind students are learning side by side with their sighted peers. Hence the blind persons are beginning to be included into the mainstream from an earlier age and this truly is progressive.
Further the media has since the past decade and half have told many a stories about blind persons that has informed, inspired and empowered not only blind and visually impaired persons, but also their families and the society at large. With stories of people like Erik Waheinmayer, the blind mountaineer who climbed Mount Everest, David Blunkett- the former Secretary of Home in the UK, Miles Hilton Barbar- the blind Pilot who flew a twin seater aircraft from London to Sidney, Dr.Geeratt Wermaij- a totally blind professor of Marine Biology, Shasha Wanlu- a totally blind detective, there is no doubting the times that are changing .
George Abraham