Disability is generally looked upon as something to pity the concerned person for and feel bad about all their missed opportunities.
Whether it be physical or mental, people with any kind of disability were for a long and especially in India, something that needed to be kept hidden away.
Because why cause them to face what they will never have, right?
Well, I am definitely proud to say on the heels of the recently concluded International Day of Persons with Disabilities we can very clearly see what with the past events that all our stereotypes about people with disabilities are completely untrue.
Be in the corporate or sector or better yet why don’t we just look at the 2016 Summer Paralympics where India had its best performance till date and earning us the medals that even the so-called ‘normal’ or abled sports-persons could not.
Winning a total of 4 medals at the Paralympics, our amazing sportspeople managed to save India’s face on the international sports scene.
Now, 4 medals might not seem like a lot, but even still for a competition to whom we had never really given much attention to, it is great.
Is Disability Truly A Hurdle To Success?
Did you that according to UN statistics, almost 1 in ever 7 people on earth have some kind of disability.
So based on that it means almost 15% and perhaps even more than people are suffering some kind or another disability in today’s time.
And yet many of our institutions and companies still do not have adequate services to accommodate people with disability.
Then we wonder why do these people don’t work or why they don’t succeed.
It is simply because due to some unfortunate reason, they have some disability that does not allow them to grasp the same things that ‘abled’ people are able to.
But it does not mean that it is a reflection on the people themselves and that they cannot succeed or make a name for themself.
With support and providing appropriate services to people with a disability there is no reason that they cannot match the level of their ‘normal’ peers.
No, Not Really. And Slowly That Is Being Noticed
Recently I was reading this article about a Chandigarh professor Dr. Jasmer Singh Saini who has worked tirelessly and without giving up hope for better inclusion of disabled persons into the corporate sector.
And slowly but surely some companies have started to include disabled people onto their workforce and having the facilities that they will require.
But one of the main thing that we need to stress and a big reason why a lot of people with disability are marginalized is because they themselves are unaware of their rights and what they are entitled to.
So to answer my own question, no I don’t believe that disability is a hurdle, it might make the route a bit trickier to navigate but not impossible. And people with disabilities should in turn be aware of what their rights are and not let people override them into thinking that they don’t matter.
Image Credits: Google Images
Other Recommendations:
http://edtimes.in/2016/09/joao-maia-is-a-blind-photographer-covering-the-rio-paralympics/
http://edtimes.in/2015/02/smartphones-for-the-disabled/
