Try surfing the internet with your eyes shut; or using the computer with fogged-up glasses. Well, that’s how it is for people who are visually impaired. And it was to cater to this huge segment of society — India has the world’s largest population of the visually challenged, estimated at 30 million — that Delhi-based IT professional, Shilpa Uttam, and her Singapore-based colleague Atul Pant, promoted Enabling Dimensions two years ago to develop computer software for people suffering visual disabilities.

“In the emerging knowledge era, denial of access to the web means a denial of knowledge and the chance to develop capabilities which determine the quality of life,” avers Uttam. Therefore in June 2001, Uttam, a mathematics graduate of Xaviers College, Ahmedabad, with a diploma in advanced computer systems management and professional training in a slew of technologies (Java, Visual basic, ASP, CGI, VB Script, Java Script, HTML, Authorware, XML and Perl) quit a promising career with Delhi-based Magic Software, to launch Enabling Dimensions.

“I always wanted to take an entrepreneurial plunge but only in a business with a socially beneficial fallout,” explains Uttam who heads the company’s software development centre in New Delhi. While scouting for a line of business in conformity with this requirement, Uttam and her team conducted a nationwide study among the visually disabled. They found there was a severe dearth of information about jobs and education opportunities for the visually challenged. This study resulted in the development of an online software programme christened EnableAll.org which helps visually challenged individuals to surf the web by using screen-reading software which reads out text displayed on a computer screen in a synthesised voice. Moreover by adhering to international universal web accessibility standards defined by the World Wide Web Consortium, EnableAll.org is also able to provide an alternate text description for all graphic and multimedia programs.

The website, perhaps the only one in the world, offers live coverage of every World Cup football game with information on the teams, players, play-offs and news trivia. It also allows users to participate in opinion polls, receive daily newsletters and offer feedback. EnableAll.org has received more than 50,000 hits with maximum traffic emanating from the US followed by Singapore, UK and India.

There’s more on the drawing board of Enabling Dimensions. Future plans include designing software for allied and other disabilities and scaling up the firm’s operations to cover south and south-east Asia. Also on the agenda is developing SpellWell, a software program to assist the blind to spell better. “Our basic objective is to empower the disabled to become knowledgeable and build capabilities. We want to make our site a global, self-help community for the disabled,” says Uttam.

God speed.

Neeta Lal (Delhi)

Magical healer

Satish Deshmukh is a medical magician. Which doesn’t mean he is a medical wizard; it’s the other way round — he’s a magician who heals through his art. A professional illusionist, Deshmukh applies his abracadabra skills to treat and heal patients suffering from a wide range of illnesses including strokes, spinal cord injuries, arthritis, head and brain injuries, mental illness, chronic pain, severe burns, learning disabilities and substance abuse. Nor is he a quack: his “magic therapy” is approved by the all-India Occupational Therapy Association and he often performs his wonders in tandem with professional physicians, physical therapists, psychotherapists and psychiatrists.

“I have thousands of tricks up my sleeve for hospitalised children and adults. For example the ‘billiard balls’ trick is particularly useful for patients with paralysis. I used it to cure my father within seven days of the ill effects of paralysis,” reveals the Mumbai-based Deshmukh. Likewise his rope and coin tricks have performed wonders for mentally challenged children.

Besides being a professional illusionist-cum-healer, Deshmukh likes to describe himself as an educator and trainer. For the past two decades he has been conducting magic workshops to train children, adults and anyone interested in developing their personality through the use of magic. They have benefited teens who are anti-social, mentally challenged, or suffer depression and attention-deficit disorders.

Deshmukh has been practicing and performing magic from the age of nine, when he staged his first show. Ever since, he knew he wanted to become a professional magician. But in deference to his family’s wishes, he completed his graduation in 1981 and also enrolled for an M.Sc. Subsequently he spent three years travelling and learning magic.

Besides working with children and the sick, Deshmukh also imparts motivational and productivity therapies to corporate executives. He designs magic-cum-motivation shows with different themes, depending on the needs of client corporates. His clients include Novartis India, Siemens, Unichem and Ford Motors. “These are not conventional magic shows, but are used by the human resource departments of client companies to train, retrain, motivate and stimulate executive performance,” says Deshmukh.

His abracadabra is also utilised by the law enforcement authorities to solve crimes including murder, rape and robbery. “I regularly advise the police and help them to solve crimes,” he avers. But sadly despite his unusual combination of professional skills, Deshmukh feels unappreciated. “In western countries magicians like David Copperfield are as respected and rich as any professional. On the other hand, magic is not seriously regarded as a profession in India.”

Not one to accept this unacceptable situation, Deshmukh has drawn up a blueprint to promote Academy of Magic and Allied Arts in Nasik, Maharashtra to train young people in the art of healing through the magic of magic.

Mona Barbhaya (Mumbai)

 

Caring counsellor

With career options rapidly multiplying in the new globalised economy, young people are increasingly turning to professional career counsellors for advice and help in making career choices compatible with their interests and aptitudes. One such career counselling expert who has quickly built a reputation in the national capital is Meenakshi Nayyar, director of Eduserve Consultants, a career counselling group of IIM graduates and working professionals. A psychology postgraduate of MS University, Baroda with a Ph D in organisational behaviour from IIM-Ahmedabad, Nayyar worked with the well-known Delhi-based DCM Ltd for two decades before she put in her papers to promote Eduserve Consultants in October 2003.

“My corporate experience in a multi-business company where I worked made me aware that too many people mak e the wrong career decisions and remain trapped in them for all their lives. I was always interested in working with children and students, particularly girls, to offer them guidance and support in making appropriate career choices. Therefore the promotion of Eduserve is the realisation of a life-long ambition,” she says.

Just eight months old, Eduserve has already held over two dozen workshops in schools in Delhi and its environs, and at Delhi’s India Habitat Centre, where it periodically runs a two-day Career Highway Workshop on education and career choices for secondary, senior secondary, and college students. They are driven by Eduserve’s 3-P Concept — a series of tests and questionnaires designed by Nayyar to help students understand their personalities, recognise their potential, and discover appropriate career paths.

“Parents tend to accord exaggerated importance to careers in engineering and medicine. But in our workshops we counsel students to choose aptitudinally appropriate career options. We work on the premise that every student can excel; not merely the scholastically successful. Our workshops are designed to facilitate students’ awareness of themselves, their personalities, strengths and limitations, which help them make informed career choices,” says Nayyar.

In addition to career counselling Eduserve conducts intensive workshops on specific careers, provides soft skills training and advice on vital issues such as adolescence, growing pains, and teen sexuality and their impact on self-development. “Emotional issues of adolescents must be taken into account while giving young people, girls in particular, guidance in career choices in an increasingly complex contemporary world,” says Nayyar.

Meenakshi Venkat (Delhi) 

 

Ryall diversifies

Despite the ground reality that licence-permit raj has migrated from industry to education, with the demand for quality education continuing to outstrip supply and a growing number of well-meaning philanthropists and trusts determined to do their bit for societal development by promoting qualitative institutions of learning, the need for expert consultancy advice is rising steadily because promoting and constructing high-quality schools, colleges and institutes is a capital-intensive business these days.

It is to meet this need that Bangalore-based educationist Akash David Ryall has promoted a four-professionals-strong education consultancy firm under the name and style of Ryall Associates. The firm which commenced operations earlier this year builds, operates and transfers schools on a turnkey basis and also offers staff recruitment, curriculum development and administration model services. “The next decade is certain to become very important for school education in particular because parents within the world’s largest middle class are becoming increasingly aware of the importance of foundational primary and secondary education. This is likely to drive them to enroll their children only in schools which offer proven high-quality holistic learning environments,” says Ryall, an alumnus of Mysore, Annamalai and the Bowling Green State (USA) universities who taught for several years in the US prior to returning to India in 1997 to take charge of the highly rated, CISCE affiliated Bethany School, Bangalore.

Seven years down the road, Bethany School which has 2,300 boys and girls on its musters, is all set to inaugurate a new pre-primary campus contiguous to its existing premises in the upscale suburb of Koramangala, and is “cruising smoothly on auto-pilot”. Meanwhile Ryall has experienced the need to contribute to the larger cause of addressing the supply side of primary-secondary education by offering his institutional development expertise to edupreneurs through Ryall Associates.

And the new firm has got off to a flying start by promoting Greenwood High, Bangalore’s “newest CISCE-affiliated independent, non-denominational and co-educational school providing 21st century holistic education to pupils of all abilities”. Constructed on a 20-acre carefully landscaped campus off the garden city’s green belt Sarajapur Road, Green wood High is all set to receive its first batch of 120 class I-V students on June 14, when its first term begins. “Greenwood High which starts off as a day school with a maximum strength of 24 students per class instructed by carefully selected faculty, will also offer residential facilities next year. We have carefully crafted the academic syllabus which is complemented by a rich and varied extra-curricular programme designed to encourage pupils to make the most of their talents,” says Ryall.

If Greenwood High delivers what Ryall promises, it will ensure that Bangalore’s newest education consultancy firm which has already lined up a long list of potential clients will fill a much needed void within the education sector of the garden city, which has staked a claim to be christened the education capital of the country.

Dilip Thakore (Bangalore)