Hi,
Mr. Kartik Sawhney whose name is mentioned in the article is from Delhi and
not from Kolkata.
Satguru
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-----Original Message-----
From: avinash shahi
Sent: Sunday, 29 September, 2013 10:11 PM
To: accessindia ; jnuvision
Subject: [AI] The Hindu: Rana Siddiqui Zaman meets George Abraham
A question of vision, not sight
http://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/tp-features/tp-sundaymagazine/a-question-of-vision-not-sight/article5180540.ece
A still from the serial. (Right) George Abraham A new television
series is trying to change society’s attitude towards the visually
impaired. Rana Siddiqui Zaman
“My family members don’t realise what I am doing on my own without
their help. They only see what I don’t or cannot. This upsets me no
end.” I remember these words by a senior research scholar I knew. He
was visually impaired.
That was in the early 1990s. Today efforts are on to make people
understand that visually-impaired people, if granted resources and
encouragement, are no less than a person with normal vision. One such
endeavour is Nazar Ya Nazariya , a new serial on Doordarshan aired
every Saturday at 9.30 a.m., which highlights the achievements of
visually-impaired people in different fields. Each episode is
introduced by actor Naseeruddin Shah — who incidentally played a
visually-impaired principal of a school in Sai Paranjpe’s critically
acclaimed film Sparsh in 1980. Television actor Harsh Chhaya anchors
the series.
The serial will feature 32 case studies from across India. For
example, a visually- and hearing-impaired dance group from Bijnour, a
businessman in Guwahati, a theatre group in Kolkata, a national
swimming champion, a journalist, a national level chess player and
people in corporate and rural India. One episode showed how
visually-impaired students have to drop science and math after Std.
VIII. It featured two boys — Karthik Sahni from Kolkata who scored 96
per cent in these subjects and has been offered a Stanford
scholarship, and Prateek Dutta who did cryptology from IIT Karakhpur
and has been conferred the J.C Bose Award — and raised the question of
whether the problem lay with the student’s capability or in the
teaching. In other episodes, visually-impaired achievers talk of their
lives or showcase their skills, while making viewers realise that they
are leading normal lives.
The serial was conceived of by George Abraham, Chief Executive Officer
of Score Foundation, an NGO dedicated to finding resources for the
visually-impaired. This is his debut production, in association with
Sightsavers, an international charity that works to combat blindness
in developing countries.
“The idea is not to raise [awareness of] problems, because everyone
knows about them. It is about making people change their inse nahi
hoga (They can’t do it) attitude. It is about trying to show that
blindness has lot of possibilities and if proper training is imparted,
the blind can be utilised as the best human resources available,”
asserts George. The serial will also suggest that the government
policies ought to support the visually impaired. “We are not focusing
on what they can’t do but on what they can. We are asking if the
problem is one of nazar ya nazariya (lack of sight or lack of
vision),” he adds
A team of 10 people travelled across India and throughout, George
says, they met curious people. Children were more interested in the
“subjects” than the shooting and wanted to know if serial timings
would clash with their school timings.
Handling the team had its own issues. Transferring his sensibilities
to the team was a challenge. For instance, “the camera would focus on
the subjects’ eyes. I didn’t want that usual negative attitude
throughout a 22-minute episode. So, I had to intervene to show them as
normal human beings,” he recalls.
George had conceived of the idea many years ago and even spoken to
actor Shashi Kapoor about it but it didn’t take off. “After a talk
with Tripurari Sharan, the Director General of Doordarshan, I posted
the idea on Facebook and filmmaker Somu Ghosh contacted me. With their
cooperation, my dream became a reality,” says George.
Though the timing is not audience-friendly, George insists this slot
has less competition, and he doesn’t have to contend with soap operas
on prime time.
Scripted by Sehba Imam and directed by Mohammad Faizan, the serial
already has people like Shashi Tharoor, Harsha Bhogle and V.V.S
Laksman tweeting about it, while MSN and Godfrey Phillips’s Be Brave
website also promote it.
--
Avinash Shahi
M.Phil Research Scholar
Centre for The Study of Law and Governance
Jawaharlal Nehru University
New Delhi India
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