The route to learning

(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?