(A
tip for the reader who
does not have the time to read
this entire piece
: the three passages highlighted in bold italic
font contain its essence.)
My
life has been spent learning a complicated subject; and later, after
having learnt some of the complex nuances of the subject, trying to
disseminate what I have learnt to others who know even less about it
than I do. And I have been through this cycle at least twice, with
mathematics the first time, and then with disability awareness. And
this is an attempt to distill what I believe is one key ingredient to
making some headway in this business of learning, and to explain this
by examples from both the careers I have embarked on:
Once
you have a vague idea of the subject and a minimal maturity to
identify the closest to a master of this subject that you have access
to, get this master to guide you up the path you should follow to
reach the desired goal.
First
the math examples. The teacher (K.M. Das) of my favourite course
during my M.Sc. used a beautifully written text book and helped me
to pursue my doctoral studies under the guidance of the author (P.R.
Halmos) of the afore-mentioned book. It so happens that when Halmos
finished his Ph.D., he went to the prestigious Institute
for Advanced Study at Princeton, although without any financial
support. This IAS had only about 5 permanent faculty – Einstein,
Godel, Veblen, von Neumann and such undoubted masters of their craft.
von Neumann later offered Halmos a fellowship, on seeing the
meticulous notes the latter was taking of the former’s legendary
series of lectures on what he termed Rings of Operators and
what the whole world now calls von Neumann algebras.
(Incidentally, these algebras yield the mathematical backdrop for
Quantum Mechanics, and have been my area of specialisation for the
past thirty years!)
And
now to my `second career’. As explained elsewhere, when I `came
down’ with Multiple Sclerosis and realised that the system in India
was not going to make any allowances for Persons with Disability
(PwD), I embarked on my own campaign to try and sensitise people on
the plight/rights of PwD. My initial sortie on this campaign was to
write a bi-monthly column in the Times of India. An initially
sympathetic Edtor gave my column a boost by putting ii up on the
Op.-Ed. Page. This happy state of affairs lasted just a bit more than
a year – until he had to cede the Op-Ed. Spot to others on his
Editorial Board who had been wanting it for `more newsy items’.
During that year, a large number of my readers convinced me that
much more needed to be done. Rather than accepting his offer to publish my `column' in their e-paper, I chose instead to write my own blog where I could decide the length of posts and their frequency. A
fortuitous set of circumstances led to my meeting a couple of masters
of disability activism, Rahul Cherian and Vaishnavi Jayakumar.
Although I did meet Rahul several times after that, I never had the
pleasure of espousing any specific issue alongside him before a cruel
stroke of Fate ended his life prematurely. I have written more on
Rahul and that epochal meeting elsewhere in my blog – at
http://differentstrokes-vss.blogspot.com/2013/02/a-giant-among-men.html.
I
have been more fortunate with Vaishnavi, We have been on several
campaigns espoused by the `Disability Rights Alliance’ (DRA), a
group without any hierarchy, of people whose one common trait is a
passion to fight for the rights of PwD. As I periodically bemoan in
my blog, DRA has been repeatedly offering their combined expertise
and their desire to work with with the Govt. before they hurriedly
put up something which needs to be retro-fitted to account for
erroneous construction – eg., the CMRL (which is yet another form
of public transport which is unusable by people who use wheelchairs
or are blind and might have the silly idea that they might travel
alone), or the Museum Complex (where the tactile tiling employed
would have led to some accidents for blind people if we had not got
the engineers to let us do an access audit before they completed
their accessification exercise).
Vaishnavi
is a master at setting up such hierarchy-free organisations as DRA. She
is probably best known for co-founding The Banyan. After branching
out from the Banyan, she has espoused the causes of people afflicted
by various forms of disability. It did not take much time for me to
realise that she was a walking encyclopedia when it came to the
problems faced by PwD, and clearly the master from whom to learn the
ropes – various sign languages employed by people with hearing
disability, enabling blind people to access the computer,
specifications of international standards for ramps, hand-rails,
disabled friendly toilets, do’s and dont’s in accepted etiquette
when dealing with people with autism, the special requirements of
people with multiple sclerosis or cerebral palsy… Recently she
informed us that the Disability Commissioner of Tamil Nadu has
changed from V. Arun Roy to B. Maheswari. It occurred to me that
both the lot of the Tamil PwD and Ms. Maheswari’s tenure, in her
new posting as Disability Commissioner of
Tamil Nadu, will stand to gain considerably from her meeting
Vaishnavi and talking to her for about an hour on the
various faces of disability and DRA’s
work. For, as Halmos demonstrated, it would be
a case of looking a gift horse in the mouth to not use the fact that
you are in the vicinity of a von Neumann.
Continuing
this contorted analogy further, ground-breaking as his work on von
Neumann algebras was, the man moved on to other things with even more
fundamental consequences, such as the then newly emerging theory
behind, and building of, the computer. Likewise, having seen The
Banyan and DRA to a reasonably functional level – not to mention
informing Arun Jaitley some basic facts about GST and their
implications for PwD - the subject of Vaishnavi’s latest attentions
caught her eye at (least as early as) the Chennai floods a few years
ago, and during the current events in Kerala. Let me quote her on
this latest foray, which is as relevant to the regularity of
impending climate change induced natural disasters as computers are
to current lifestyle.
A
bunch of us have got together as a collective informal group called
AIDER that will focus on the specific and yet oft-forgotten needs of
disabled people before, during and after disasters.
Based
on the Kerala government's list of emergency relief requirements for
disabled citizens, Team AIDER has apart from directly contacting
groups (to make their giving of aid more representative), released a
Disaster Relief Registry where focussed contributions can be made
with ease by individuals online based on the list of emergency
requirements. The item will be delivered direct to the state nodal
agency, The Kerala Social Security Mission who will distribute it
according to urgent requirements they'd earlier mapped.
Time
to #AbilifyKerala with AID for Assistive Aids ...
Visit
www.bit.ly/abilify-kerala to ensure that no one gets left behind.
#DIDRR
#KeralaFloods2028
Finally,
trying to follow in her footsteps, may I take
this opportunity to request the CM of Kerala to apportion at least 3%
of the sum collected in his relief fund only for the purpose of
helping the PwD affected by the rains?
