Making light of dark stuff
Sharmila Ganesan Ram,
TNNOct 20, 2013, 05.34AM IST
'I am a Kannadiga from Bangalore," Sundeep Rao tells an audience full of
Tamilians in Coimbatore. Then he bends over and makes a show of hiding his
bottle
of water from the room. Even though Rao's left hand takes a second longer to
find the bottle, the Cauvery crisis reference works instantly, laughter fills
the delay and no one notices the Kannadiga's real problem. Bullet dodged.
Rao is a partially blind standup comedian who loves bragging that he can joke
about sex in front of his mother because "I can't see her". She started becoming
blurry when he was eight. At that age, he was diagnosed with juvenile macular
degeneration - a condition that damaged his retina and rendered him with
only partial eyesight in both eyes. Rao now has only peripheral vision so he
cannot see faces or read books. For him, crossing the road, climbing up the
stairs, walking down the road to buy a cigarette are all forms of extreme
sport. "It is the longest relationship I have been in," says Rao, now 30,
referring
to his eyesight that has been diminishing over the last 23 years.
Before every show, his mind is a battleground. What if I trip on the stairs?
What if I can't find the mike plug on time? Where exactly is the bottle of
water placed? What if I mistake a boy in the front row for a girl? Will I
become the joke? But he wins over these internal demons and gets on stage
anyway,
because, here, his misery is material. "Standup is as much therapy for me as it
is a profession," says Rao, who recently performed his first-ever solo
show called Out of Sight, where he establishes right at the beginning that he
is partially blind.
The show is an amalgam of his personal wounds that turned into jokes on
healing. Since Rao does not carry a cane or wear thick, dark glasses, Indians
refuse
to believe that he has an impairment. When he tells them he is visually
impaired, they ask him, "But where's your cane?" "Indians see disability as
either
black or white. They don't understand partial blindness," Rao says. Once,
during an airport check-in, he told the lady at the counter that he would need
assistance as he is partially blind. She asked him if he would like a
wheelchair. "I let them soak in till they become funny," he says, about these
dollops
of entertainment that have found their way into his confessional show. However,
it took almost two years to get here.
When he started out as a standup in 2011, this former IT company copywriter
preferred to hide behind general jokes - the banal abbreviations in the
technical
mails he used to proofread, lame jokes of colleagues about his glorified desk
job, how the Welsh accent makes even the Indian accent sound posh and why
singer Bono should use Google (a reference to U2's song I can't find what I'm
looking for). He would then, suddenly, launch into jokes about blindness
but the transition was awkward. "Nobody would laugh when I did jokes about
blindness. They could not get why a person without flaws was making fun of the
visually impaired," says Rao.
Today, his voice is more authentic. Rao - who has performed everywhere from a
middle-aged lady's garage ("they were probably expecting a stripper") to
corporate events - has lost many of his inhibitions. "I don't feel
self-conscious asking for assistance anymore." He does not feel the need to
memorize
the seating order of girls and boys in the front row and when people ask him
about his absent cane, he has learnt to say, "I don't have it because I can't
find it."
Besides, Rao, who says he is in a happy relationship now, does not shy away
from discussing the dangers of dating as a partially blind person such as waking
up to find a guy in his bed the morning after. Even in front of his mother.
Source:
http://articles.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/2013-10-20/stoi/43219823_1_jokes-blindness-sundeep-rao
Regards,
Shiv
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