There is a cream visiting card in
my wallet that reads Former Chief Election Commissioner of India. Yet, if I close
my eyes and think of Navin Chawla, I will see him breaking a Rs. 5 KitKat bar
into three to share with the police officer accompanying us and the driver of
the VIP black Merc courtesy The Park.
There is a note on my phone with
an email id of India’s most famous ad man. But if I close my eyes and think of
Prahlad Kakar, I will only hear uproarious laughter, spontaneity and the
ability to talk of everything from a soufflé omelette to scuba diving. That, or
the time he asked me for the Tamil translation of ‘fruitface’, venturing to try
himself and coming up with ‘pazhimoonja’ or something like that.
There is a picture of the stage
on my phone, and in centre stage wearing a pale pink bhandini sari, sits Bollywood’s
mother figure. Yet, if I were to close my eyes and think of Jaya Bachchan, I
would hear her voice congratulating me on feeding the teleprompter, smiling as
she squeezed my arm in congratulations.
There was a moment when I went up
to introduce myself to Siddharth Jayakumar, a boy who has cerebral
palsy and has worked in the private banking sector for over five years now. I
meant to tell him I had seen him at many events before but never had the chance
to talk to him before he stopped me and asked “aren’t you the girl from TEDx?”
Turns out he had told his mother the same thing.
My afternoon at includABILITY 20,
Ability Foundation’s celebration of their 20th anniversary, was a
humbling evening of learning and inspiration in a room filled with such different
people, each a celebrity in their own right.
There will be a bigger article
that comes out in places other than my blog, but till then, here it is. The
memory of greatness standing merely feet away. The experience of humility and
gratitude of having the chance to be a part of that moment. The opportunity to
grow.
In that room were people with
disability and people supposedly without, there were celebrities and then aam
junta. There was laughter and there were hugs. There was never-ebbing
conversation in everything from English to sign. In those few hours, identities
were put on pause – he wasn’t an ad man, she wasn’t a heroine, he wasn’t an IAS
officer, she wasn’t an activist. In those few hours, everyone sat together and
held hands through stories of pain and struggle, discrimination and bullying,
and ultimately strength. In those few hours, we were all audience to stories of
immense will power and determination.
Yesterday, I met India’s biggest
ad-man and a top-ranking heroine of a generation past and the man who ran
multiple elections. But I also met a blind cognitive neuroscientist who
paraglides for fun, a deaf girl who struggled through insensitive mainstream
schooling to become a trainer today and a quality control executive from a
famous corporate who has celebral palsy and left the audience in splits with
his humour, even as they stood to give him a standing ovation. Tell me, who are
the celebrities? Who are the real heroes?
