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Create awareness on disability

Create awareness on disability

Create awareness on disability


By Deepak Parvatiyar
What is the most enduring image of the London Olympics that ended after many heroics last week?
Chances are that many would recall Osain Bolt’s gestures after winning his races,or Michael Phelps’s golden swansong! For Indian fans images of a heartbroken Mary Com, Sushil Kumar or Saina Nehwal (they all won medals and earned laurels but fell short of their own expectations of winning gold for the country) may last for long.
As for me, I can never forget a proud Oscar Leonard Carl Pistorius running the men’s 400 m final and the anchor leg of the 4x400 m relay final for the South Africans and thereafter carrying the flag of South Africa at the closing ceremony.The valiant runner has undoubtedly emerged as a legend of the London Olympics. Sprinting on his carbon-fiber blades, he has single handedly crossed the final frontier, if I can borrow the famous lines from Star Trek, “to boldly go where no man has gone before”.
Never before had a double amputee athlete participated in a summer Olympics game, lest reached the finals of all the categories where (s)he participated. Never before had the special abilities of a physically handicapped sprinter challenged others to an extent that the able-bodied started crying foul over Pistorius’s artificial carbon-fiber lower limbs, which they claimed gave him an unfair advantage over others.
Although he could not win any medals, Pistorius did give a new dimension to physical abilities. Perhaps for the first time ever in the sporting history of mankind, here was an athlete who was able to demolish the myth that a disabled person is an unequal competitor in sports. (People with disabilities already compete with others and even do better in fields other than sports). He just not barged into the domain of physically fit super athletes with his artificial limbs, but in the process even defeated some of the topmost athletes in the games.
So what does Pistorius’s achievement prove? That a person with disability has finally conquered the last frontier! I think he has proved to the world that it is high time that the idea of disability be given a re-look.
This re-look on the issue of disability is even more important in a country like ours where disability is still associated with beggars even in the Western world. (Consider the scene from Oscar winning Hollywood flick Slumdog Millionaire where the mafia inflict physical disability on children so that they get more in alms!)
It sounds appalling but the fact remains that in our country, as a recent episode of popular Amir Khan reality television show Satyamev Jayate on the theme of disability brought to the notice, the government levies 5 per cent duty on imported equipment for disabled people(which was as high as 30-40 per cent till about eight years ago),…and that till 2001 there was no data collected on the people with disability in the Census…and that there was mention of disability at all in the first ten five-year plans of the country!
Predictably, there is no infrastructure for the disabled in our country and I remember Anil Kumar, our country’s first and only blind acupuncturist, conceding in my documentary on him – The Wizard of Needles, that as a child his biggest challenge was to get admission in a ‘normal’ school where he could compete with the normal students to prove that he was not inferior to them in any way. He did get the admission in a government school, but the school principal had made it clear that the school was in no position to provide him facilities such as reader, writer, books in Braille etc.
Nobody can question that disabled persons need adequate facilities than mere sympathy to live an independent life. The success of Pistorius proves this point.But are we prepared to provide equal opportunities to the disabled in view of the fact that unlike in the Western world, where the disabled are provided adequate infrastructure to feel independent, we actually treat them with disdain?
Last week I had the privilege of attending a workshop on the issue of ‘Disability touched by faith’ at the prestigious India International Centre in New Delhi. In this land of spirituality and faith, the topic was indeed appealing, yet what caught my imagination was the resolve shown by the disabled participants to live their lives with dignity, and independently, despite all odds.
“Why me? I used to ask the God…but I have full faith in him. I am happy that He made me a human being and I enjoy every bit of it,” said one of the participants, Sanjeev Sachdeva, who has risen to the position of joint director, Lok Sabha, despite being afflicted with Muscular dystrophy at the age of 23 that made him an invalid.
Despite his disease, Sachdeva has been able to be an achiever. Can he be called a disabled? So who is disabled? At the same workshop a doctor – an uncle of a polio victim – said he felt disabled without his stethoscope and the nursing staff and asked whether there was anyone in the world who could claim that (s)he was not disabled? Already much is being debated over the aptness of the term ‘disabled’. Many advocate disbanding the term in favour of something like ‘differently-abled’.
Nomenclatures do matter but is it really humiliating to call a disabled a disabled? In this context I wish to again refer to Satyamev Jayate where a visually impaired participant declared emphatically: “Yes we are disabled. What is wrong? We are very proud. I am very proud being blind.”
Obviously no one likes to be called a ‘disabled’ just because of certain physical handicaps. Isn’t it therefore time to educate ourselves about the ‘disabled’ and their different abilities? Movies on disability issues have always struck an emotional chord with the masses – be it Koshish, Dosti, to more recent Taare Zamin Par and Paa. Unfortunately, despite their success, not many films are made on the issue of disability. Till today the government has no funds allocated for creating awareness on the disability issues. The country’s oldest and only travelling international film festival – We Care filmfest on the disability issues started as an effort of an individual Satish Kapoor, who quit his executive’s job in a major company to pursue this pioneering work. Ask him and he would tell you that for the first two years, he had no films on disability issues for the competition other than some foreign feature films that he could procure through foreign embassies and a handful of Bollywood films that he could get the permission to show from the producers. Kapoor though, persisted with his endeavour and today he has a bank of over 450 films on disability which are not only the inspiring stories of human resilience in the face of all odds, some of the films are made by the disabled persons themselves.
Although his efforts today has the backing of institutions such as United Nations Information Centre –India and Bhutan, UNESCO, National Trust (an autonomous organization of the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment, Government of India), and Asian Academy of Film and Television, isn’t it time to offer a larger canvass to such films, and better incentives to filmmakers to make such films, for a better awareness on disability issues?
It is time that the government procures these films and show them on national channels. Then only perhaps, we will be able to appreciate the achievements of South African Pistorius, or the struggles of our own Anil Kumar, on equal terms.
The writer is a senior journalist and filmmaker.

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