Monday 28 September 2015

Learning from the Legends: includABILITY 20

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 soufflĂ© 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?