Aawaz is a year-long documentary series by RC ATLAS wherein every month they are covering different social problems prevalent in society. They raise voices so the unheard can be heard. This month they are giving the mic to Persons with Disability so that they can share their stories.
Look it up and Google will tell you that a ‘disability is a physical or mental condition that limits a person’s movement, senses, or activities’. However, ‘disability’ is not an adjective that defines a person’s potential. For a lot of us, it is through the 12th-grade psychology textbooks that we learned the topic of disabilities in a deeper context.
Society’s Views on Differently-Abled Individuals
Why is it that only if we have to pursue psychology, that we need to learn about disabilities and sensitize their needs? This lack of general awareness is reflected in how society views differently-abled people.
Persons with Disabilities need us, as a community, to educate ourselves on the disability they might be facing and not sympathize with their condition.
Dearth of Attention Towards Differently-Abled Individuals
Invisible challenges that we often turn a blind eye to, do exist, such as communication/attitudinal barriers that arise from the lack of an empathetic mindset from society.
How many of us know how to read and write braille? Or, read and speak in sign language? Or even the right way of addressing it? Fashion trends keep changing and evolving every month in the industry, but the pace of fashion for adaptive clothing for persons with a disability still remains stagnant.
Community spaces like Art galleries lack inclusivity when it comes to catering to sensory engagement for the visually impaired.
Interview with Cafe Arpan and Access For All
In an interview conducted by our team with Siddhant Shah from ‘Access For All’ and Ms. Ashaita from Yash Charitable Trust, they speak about the necessity of creating an inclusive environment for the persons with disabilities
‘There is no greater disability in society than the inability to see a person as more’.
It’s time for us to change the way we look at things, starting with the terminology around disability that has evolved over time. Terms like ‘handicapped,” ‘deaf,” and ‘retarded’ have been replaced with terms that focus on the person rather than the disability. For example, persons with disabilities or persons with visual impairments.
The small efforts on our part go a long way so let us put our stereotypes aside and let the disabled decide their abilities.
If this article intrigued you to learn more about the concerns of persons with disability, check out the interview with Cafe Arpan on RC ATLAS’ AAWAZ YouTube page.
Suggestions from RC ATLAS
The Rotaract Club of ATLAS SkillTech University is made up of enthusiastic young people who get together to create initiatives that aim to produce a positive shift every single time, keeping the blend of ground humanitarian work in the hectic corporate-driven world alive.
Our goal is to forge close ties with other like-minded organizations and individuals while working to meet the physical and social needs of the people in our neighborhood. We also have Community service projects like Food distribution drive, Health/eye checkup, Blood donation drive, Skill development activities with BMC kids and many more.
If you have any suggestions for any social problem that you’d like to see get covered in the next episode of Aawaz please send your ideas at rtr.jheelmehta@gmail.com or you can also share your ideas with ShikshaNews at shikshanews18@gmail.com.
Other Episodes from AAWAZ
[Article by Rtr. Roza Alex]
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