Pink. It has been my only favourite colour since childhood. Every
time I go shopping, I can only spot the pink stuff. I feel a kind of internal calm
when things around me are pink in colour. What is your favourite colour? What would happen if this colour no longer existed? How would life be if there no
longer were colours? Pretty bland, I'd say. And very very depressing.
It was some weekday in August of 2013. I had just come back from
class and was hurriedly getting ready to go watch my favourite actor, Shah Rukh
Khan on the big screen. My mother had been ready for the past twenty minutes and
was shouting at me to hurry up. But I was having a lot of difficulty doing so. In
a wardrobe full of pink clothes, I had run out of a pretty pink dress that I could
wear that evening. After a lot of screaming and cursing, both myself and my fate,
I finally got ready and my mother and I set out for the theatre. And as my "fate"
would have it, we got stuck in traffic. It was there that I saw this. It was not
an accident, it was not an argument I got into. It was a few seconds of seeing pink,
that changed my thinking that point hence.
Standing at the bus stop was this teenage guy. Good looking,
smiling and happy. He was in a beautiful, bright pink shirt. A shirt, his friend
on whose shoulder his hand rested, might not have worn. A shirt any other guy would
not have worn for fear of being tagged gay, something I am not against, by the way.
A shirt he himself might not have worn, for the same reason as others, if only he
could have seen his reflection in the mirror. A colour he might not have worn, if
only her weren't blind.
He didn't know what colour he was wearing. He didn't know what
pink looked like. He wouldn't be upset that his pink dress was not pink enough to
wear to a dark movie theatre. And this realisation made me feel very small. It made
me realize that those of us blessed with all parts of our body, tend to be very
insensitive. Although it isn't practically possible to not lead our normal lives
and be extra sensitive each time, we need to put in conscious effort into making
the lives of the disabled better.
India and Indians are poorer in comparison to other developed
countries and it is therefore obvious that advanced infrastructural availability
to aid the disabled would not be possible. But we aren't even close to bridging
that gap. Not only do we not have the means to help them, but we are constantly
coming up with things that, in my opinion, are emotionally insensitive too. How
many big display, full LED smartphone advertisements don't we air on the television
each day? Do we stop to think about that section of the society which just cannot
be bothered with how bright the display is, because they cannot see it? There are
options of voice enabled smartphones, solely to help the blind, but those are to
be found on news channels or in a corner or a magazine. Our advertisements do not
talk about them for they don't generate revenue. This era of smartphone boom is
particularly cruel to those deprived of the ability to see. And it saddens me to
be a part of the culture. Can't we spend the money we would otherwise spend buying
that second cellphone or those unnecessary clothes from a discount store into making
another person's life better?
We sure can argue that by spending lesser on items we don't necessarily
require will not go into helping people with disabilities and that medical innovations
alone can help them. And also that it is the government's duty to take care of.
But my point here is medical breakthroughs require research, which requires funding,
something our country cannot afford to spend a lot on. Therefore, if we people can
even crowdfund such researches, we might be able to bring in some change.
The guy in the pink shirt couldn't use a smartphone just the
way his friend was using. Nor could he go to the movie theatre to watch a movie
like I did. I couldn't do anything for him that day other than feeling sympathetic.
But by being aware that there are blind people out there who aren't really affected
by matching pink dresses, I wouldn't spend extra on making it match. I would instead
put my money into upcoming technologies like VR that currently bestow improved vision
to those with partial seeing ability and hope that it would some day become affordable
enough for everybody to be able to see my favourite colour. Wouldn't you want that
too?
