People of Value

Patna

Nagpur

Patna: Suman Kumar

Stairs stare at him mockingly, reminding him of his disability. He hates to climb them but at the same time he loves to meet challenges. Despite being physically challenged (disability in both legs) he has achieved many a feat a healthy person will fear to think of. For Suman Kumar, adventure is not only a sport, it is a medium for him to bring smiles on hundred of faces which are waiting to wither away in the heat of AIDS.

Suman has been in the news as he dared to climb the 94-foot high 'Golghar' in 23 minutes and came down with the help of a ring-rope in 8 minutes in the presence of a large gathering. His 'Adventure Golghar' was part of the ongoing 11th National Youth Festival and he repeated this feat after 11 years with a motive to create awareness about AIDS.

He runs a school, Umeed International, for slum children residing in Beur area of the state capital and is also the founder of an NGO, 'Disabled Sports and Welfare Academy'. He said that the government schools did not get adequate number of students from the poor section of society despite providing them mid-day meals.

There are 95 students in his school and they are regular in attending classes. He wants to go to Lhasa in Tibet on his tricycle with a message about nuclear disarmament and even scale the Eiffel Tower in France.

He feels that we should use our energy for flower farming and making available pieces of bread for the underprivileged masses instead of spending time, money and energy on developing means of mass destruction.

Source: Disability no handicapped for Suman Kumar. The Hindustan Times, Patna, 16 February 2006.

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Nagpur: Amrita Bhople

She will never see what appears on the television screen. But 20-year-old Amrita Bhople, the country's first blind TV newsreader, says she can sense it because for her, news reading is about connecting the right dots.

She says that she has always believed that she could do it She is a MA English student and says that people think that she cannot read the news because she is blind but she is determined to prove them wrong. She feels that the blind grapple with an inferiority complex; she wants to change that.

She works in the newsroom of the local Bharat Cable Network (BCN). Her mother, Chhaya, dictates the news script and she writes it in Braille. In an hour she is ready for the bulletin. She reads out the news with perfect diction and looks like any other newsreader.

The MD of the company, Siraj Sheikh, says that she is better than most of their other anchors. She said that everyone expected the blind to opt for music and become music teachers which is why she chose to be a newsreader, though she had music as a subject in her BA.

It has been three years now since she started reading news on BCN-both in Marathi and Hindi. Amrita says the tragedy is not that she is blind, but that she is excluded from the mainstream. She was hurt the most when the All India Radio, Nagpur; refused to even accept her application for the post of an announcer for a programme aimed at the youth.

Her mother, Chhaya, who is the driving force behind her success said that she gets very disturbed with such rejections. They tell her that that's how the world is, and that one has to fight in every situation.

In the SSC examinations, Amrita made it to the merit list in the handicapped category. But in the HSC examinations, she studied harder and made it to the general category merit list. Her aunt Mamta Dharme, with whom Amrita and her mother stay, says: "The word impossible is not in her dictionary."

Source: Girl moves from darkness to light. DNA, Mumbai, 19 February 2006.

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