Doing Beautiful Things With Life
By Yoginder Sikand
30 November, 2015
Countercurrents.org
Life is full of challenges, and no one’s life is without them. Our life’s journey crucially depends on how we handle the challenges that come our way. And what better way to learn how to do that than from people who’ve had to face immense odds but yet have triumphed over them, turning what seemed to be debilitating handicaps into a means for their own growth and for helping others, too?
I had the good fortune of meeting many such people recently, at the India Inclusion Summit 2015, held at Bangalore. The summit, launched some years ago and now an annual event, brought together several hundred people in a packed auditorium, who listened spell-bound to dozen or so men and women who’ve had to face enormous challenges and are now doing beautiful things with their lives.
Among the speakers at the summit was Bhavesh Bhatia, a blind entrepreneur, founder of a candle-making company that makes and distributes over 9000 different types of candles and many of whose over 200 employees are visually-challenged people. There was L. Subramani, a visually-challenged journalist who works with the Bangalore-based daily Deccan Herald and is author of Lights Out: A True Story of a Man’s Descent Into Blindness (published by Random House India). There was Sumanth K V, born with cerebral palsy, who went on to graduate from the Indian Institute of Management, Indore, and now works with Flipkart. There was Ajit Babu, who also has cerebral palsy and is an independent brand consultant and entrepreneur. There was Mohammed Asif Iqbal, who lost his eyesight at the age of 16 and went on to become the first blind graduate of St. Xavier’s College, Calcutta, and later played an important role in initiating a reservation quota for the disabled in the Indian Institutes of Management, the Indian Institutes of Technology and all government universities in the country.
There was Deepa Narasimhan, born with spinal muscular atrophy (which means she uses a wheelchair to move around), who was instrumental in launching the Disability Empowerment Resource Group India network, and is a partner in KickStart, an accessible cab service for people with special needs in Bangalore. There was athlete Deepa Malik, winner of the Arjuna Award (the highest official award for a sportsperson in the country)—she’s a paraplegic who was left paralysed from chest down during a procedure to remove a spinal tumour, and is a biker, swimmer, car rally driver, entrepreneur and motivational speaker. There was Hans Dalal, whose cerebral palsy has not stopped him from becoming an environment enthusiast and mountaineer and founding PROWL, an organization that works for ecological protection. There was Vinod Thakur, who doesn’t have legs but is an amazing dancer and founder of a dance academy. There was Nipun Malhotra, born with a rare disorder that leads to lack of muscles in the arms and legs, and who is founder of the Nipman Foundation which supports people with ‘disabilities’ get access to wheelchairs.
In addition, there were a host of other speakers who are doing wonderful things for and with people with disabilities, including Kalyani Khona, who is working on a matchmaking app for people with disabilities worldwide, Patu Keswani, Chairman of the Lemon Tree Hotel Company that has a significant number of employees who are physically challenged, Uma Tuli, founder of Amar Jyoti Charitable Trust that works for the rehabilitation of the physically-challenged people, Anirudh Sharma, Co-Founder of Ducere Technologies and inventor of Lechal, a shoe originally designed for the visually impaired, and Dhimant Parekh, who, along with his wife Anuradha Kedia, runs The Better India web portal (www.thebetterindia.com), a great source of stories about positive things being done by people across India.
The positivity, cheerfulness and enthusiasm that the speakers—even those who had been through the most harrowing times—radiated were utterly infectious. These men and women were fired with a zest and reverence for life, and that forced me to look at my own life and what I was doing with it. They were people who had faced far greater challenges than I had, and they weren’t moaning or complaining about it or wallowing in self-pity. They had faced what had come their way with faith and courage and had emerged immensely stronger for it. And not just that! They were now spending their lives doing beautiful things for themselves as well as for others, including people who’d been through the same sort of traumas as they had.
The privilege of being able to learn about the lives of these amazing people and about how they were bringing joy and purpose out of immense suffering gave me reason to continue to believe that despite the challenges we must all face, life is still worth living and that one can do many beautiful things with it!
(Yoginder Sikand is an occasional freelance writer, currently based in Bangalore)