ALOK SIKKA SPEAKS AT INAUGURATION OF 2009 BATCH OF TTC COURSE AT AADI

Reproduced is the test of Alok Sikka’s speech at the inauguration of TTC course’s batch for 2009 for AADI.
A person with disability, especially a person with severe disability like me lives in two different worlds at a given point of time. There is one world that is just the same as you live in but for me as person with disability there is one other world that is far more important than the other world, and that is my immediate world that consists of my family and the rehabilitators that I am so closely connected with.
Off late, at least I have had this feeling that to a large extent there is a difference between the parent’s perspective of disability and a professional’s perspective of disability. The problem for a person with disability is that these two perspective of disability, as seen by parents and rehabilitators more than often are entirely different to each other. And eventually it’s the person with disability, who is caught in between. You see, since most families do not have a prior experience of tackling disability, they usually get baffled when they realize that one of the members of their family is going to go through all this. That is where your role comes in. Having worked in the field, you should be able to help the parents realize the true and appropriate potential of a person with disability and to develop it in the right manner so that a person with disability can overcome his weakness and lead a successful life.
If you have a look at all the success stories in AADI, one very common feature in all of them were that there was nothing special in them and neither was anything made out to be special for them. The more you yourself try to replace the word special with usual for a person with disability, the more you would help him. Let his life be as usual as a possible. Let him go to school at the age of three, play and fight with his friends, get scolded both at home and school as a normal child and he would grow up just like others. It has to be a gradual process. If someone has a disabled teenaged child and gets inspired to see another disabled teenaged child get into limelight after clearing his class 10th with high marks and want the same to happen to his child, unfortunately he is too late. That process had to start at the age of three itself like any other child. But who is going to communicate this to the child’s parents and that too at the right time? Its you.
Your relation the person with disability should be such that irrespective of his ability or disability, the person with disability, for whom you are one of the most important persons of his life, is able to communicate and discuss any issue with complete freedom. Its you who have to create that atmosphere and make this dream a reality.
Of course, I personally feel that the biggest rule in for you while working in this field is that there are no rules. Your reaction to a situation will depend on other person’s ability, his circumstances, and other socio-economic conditions. Rather than expecting him to change, its you who will need to change and see the world from his perspective and needs. Two people with similar problem may need a totally different solution and you should be ready with it.
In short, a person with disability needs your support right from the day he is born till the day he lives. You need to not only support him and his family all along in his long period of time but also need to make him feel that you are working along with him rather than working for him. Let the person with disability lead a normal life, knowing that you are there to be with him whenever he needs you. For you, it should be meaningless if that so called need, whether to overcome his disabilit6y, or any other problem like social needs or emotional, needs are for a moment or life long.
Of course, needless to say, during the course of time, you will realize that working in the sector, you gain more than you give.