Handicapped? Says who?
By A Staff Reporter


NEW DELHI: Sonia Sharma, a first-year-student of Sri Venkateshwara College, doing her honours in statistics, has been learning Bharatnatyam from the age of five. Her beautiful abhinaya (expressions) and clear footwork, have a freshness of appeal that is evident only when a dancer is totally involved with her performance.

But all this comes as a surprise, because Sonia suffers from hearing impairment. So does Priya Agarwal, her co-dancer and a student of Class VII, at Saraswati Shishu Mandir or Piyush, also a Class VII student of Sriram School, who acted at Hanuman in the dance drama Udaan.

The performances were directed by Bharatnatyam dancer Jayalakshmi Eshwar. At least 20 hearing impaired children performed at the FICCI auditorium on Saturday. The children were performing at the founder's day function of the special school for hearing impaired, that they attend alongside regular schools.

The special school is run at the YMCA, by Suniye, an organisation founded six years ago by parents of children with hearing impairment.

"The unique thing about our school is that we enable children who are hearing impaired to cope with normal life, so that they don't feel handicapped. So all our 95 students are enrolled in normal schools and come to us for a half-an-hour slot as many times a week as they need to, after or before their usual school timings," says Parvathi Ramakrishna, secretary and a founder member of Suniye.

Source: The Times of India
Dated 14th May 2001