Sight...

today's venue for the Aashayein Foundation was a blind school for kids...this place had a whopping 350 inmates - one of the largest group I've been to with AF. By the time I reached, breakfast was almost over.

The kids here are in different stages of blindness...there're kids who can see, some partially blind and the rest completely...I didn't really understand what are the kids who can see clearly doing at the school - was it an attempt of the organization to help the visually impaired align better with the mainstream or something else? I didn't get a chance to find out...I've heard/read somewhere that when one of the senses stops working, others get developed to make up for the loss - something that I clearly witnessed today...the kids played a game of cricket...the ball was quite different from what we use...it was a plastic ball with some smaller balls/bells inside it, so that whenever the ball moved, it made a lot of noise - which helped the kids track the ball precisely...I was amazed at the degree of precision...bowling rules were different - the ball was rolled on the concrete floor, rather than bounced...and there was one particular batsman who was extremely precise in estimating the position and the speed of the ball (Heisenberg would have had second thoughts about his uncertainity principle had he seen this kid batting...the school had lot of other advanced facilities as well...there was a computer center dedicated to teaching the kids basic and advanced computer operations...they were using special speech softwares that enables the visually impaired operate the computer without the help of a mouse...all the operations are fed into the computer by the keyboard and hence the visually impaired are adept at using the keyboard...the set of commands is different for different kinds of applications and hence the memory of these kids needs to be very sharp in order to remember all the different sets of commands...there was a software that was taking scanned inputs of regular books from a scanner and then reading it out aloud...so all the books for advanced studies need not be available in Braille...some of the smarter kids here are even taught C/C++ programming and database operations...the instructor was boasting about some kids who have gone ahead to being Chartered Accountants in companies...there were some others who have gone for higher studies like everyone else...there were a couple of kids who have represented the country in sports for visually impaired...

what the school tries to do is to facilitate the kids with opportunities to use the rest of their senses to make up for the loss of sight...they try to instill a sense of self confidence and "can do" attitude in these kids so that they can align with the mainstream society without being dependent on others...

...these people may not have the power of sight, but when it comes to having a vision, they're probably much stronger than many of the 'normal' people.

slideshow of rest of the pics from today...