India Inclusion Summit 2016 – Live Blog
India Inclusion Summit 2016 begins with a short talk and a musical performance by Ghatam Suresh Vaidyanathan. Coming from a family of musicians, he developed a deep love for music from quite an early age. Since then he has mastered the art of playing the Ghatam. You can read more about his life’s journey here.
This morning, he addressed the crowd with an inspiring talk and went on to mesmerize us with his beautiful and energetic music. While he plays the ghatam, he’s being accompanied by other talented artists like Bharadwaj, Somnath, Amit Nari, and Prabhat Kiran.
10 am [update]
Pranav Lal is a visually impaired photographer who has been capturing the world around us with vOICe technology. He talks about how light is not necessary to visualise. vOICe technology uses image-to-sound renderings to help visually challenged people “see”. Pranav Lal has been using this technology to capture his images.
11 am [update]
Meera Shenoy is the author of You Can and the founder-chairperson of Youth4Jobs, an organisation that trains underprivileged disabled and non-disabled youth, and helps them gain employment with companies like World Bank and UNDP. She believes in transforming every “I Can’t” into an “I Can”. Her organisation is currently working towards setting up a global training centre for the visually impaired.
11.30 am [update]
Rajdeep Manwani is an academician, trainer, motivational speaker, life coach, counselor, and quizmaster. He has been a part of IIS for quite some time now. He began his speech by talking about the unclarified assumptions that we make about disabled people. Manwani narrated various stories of how overenthusiastic people ‘assume’ persons with disability need help and harassed them with their unwanted aid. At the end of the speech he asked us, “You have landed at IIS, but have you arrived?”
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Anshu Gupta, the founder of Goonj, was awarded the Ramon Magsaysay award for his contribution to the field of social entrepreneurship. His NGO Goonj helps underprivileged people earn clothing for doing various kinds of work. Goonj sources garments from different parts of India and distributes it amongst people who can’t afford clothes. He spoke about how though food, clothing, and shelter are the three basic needs, people only remember to donate clothing during disasters. He also talked about the various schemes that his organisation is running like ‘Work for Clothing’ and ‘My Pad’.
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IIS felicitates six IIS fellows for their outstanding social work in various fields.
Anusha Reddy – Associate Director at IDIA Charitable Trust
Sunil Jain – Founder of Astha Foundation
Neha Arora – Founder of Planet Abled
Aman Srivastva – Founder of Project Mudra
Abhinav Dey – Founder of Freedesign
[update]
Mariyappan Thangavelu, an Indian disabled athlete from Salem, who won a gold medal in the 2016 Rio Summer Paralympics games, came to the stage and the crowd gave him a standing ovation. Mariyappan has overcome many odds to reach where he is today. His coach Satyanarayana says that there’s no looking back for Mariyappan and that he is looking forward to the World Championship in London, and Paralympics 2020. IIS felicitated him for his achievements and for making his country proud. V.R Feroze also took the opportunity to congratulate his guru and coach, Satyanarayana, who has trained other paralympic athletes and is one of the most successful Indian coaches of all time.
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Vilas Nayak came on stage and awed the audience with some speed painting. The music started playing and he began painting a portrait of Mariyappan. As we watched and the music reached its cresencdo, Vilas completed the portrait within a few minutes and presented it to Mariyappan.
Brent Vaughan
Brent Vaughan is the co-founder and CEO of Cognoa, a company that helps parents track the development of their children. Brent talked about the autism levels in the United States and India, and the importance of identifying development issues as early as possible. He and his team have created an app that will help parents identify and handle these issues.
1 pm [update]
A regular in A.R. Rehman’s musical troupe, Vijay Prakash is a playback singer who has sung many chartbusters in films like Swades, Cheeni Kum, and Slumdog Millionaire. He’s one of four voices behind the Grammy and Academy Award-winning song ‘Jai Ho’. He performed the song live for us and followed it up with a Kannada number, and the title song from the Tamil movie Hosanna. Vijay Prakash ended the first half of the summit by singing the theme song of IIS, written by KYS columnist Ashwin Karthik. If you haven’t read Ashwin’s MondayTruclusions yet – now’s your chance!
2.30 pm Post-lunch [update]
Priyanka Agarwal, an IBM employee, is also the global face for diversity of the company. She entertained us with a dance performance and spoke to us about the challenges she faced as a visually impaired person. A highly qualified individual, Priyanka faced several setbacks while looking for a job and financial independence.
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Amish Tripathi, the bestselling author of the Shiva Trilogy, came onto the stage and talked about his success story and his passion for writing. He said that almost 20 publishers told him that his books wouldn’t sell because it was based on religion. He didn’t have much hope, but his books ended up being incredibly successful. Before writing the Immortals of Meluha, he had never written fiction.
Tripathi talked about disability and said that if we can look at disabled people as Gods then our perception will change. He went on to say that God is not an external entity but something that resides in every one of us. If we can see God in everything, we’ll be able to appreciate everyone around us.
If you’re a fan of his work, you will be happy to know that a TV series might be made based on the Shiva Trilogy. Towards the end of the session, he took on some questions from the audience and talked about Lord Shiva and the current hot topic of conversation – demonetisation.
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Felicia Shafiq, a bilateral amputee below the knee, is a Canadian SAP employee and an avid volleyball player. She lost her father at the age of 11 and her life changed in many ways after that. Although she’s based out of Canada right now, her roots lie in Fiji. She was visiting her motherland when she fell ill in February of 2011.
She was hospitalized and doctors told her family that she wouldn’t survive. But her mother gathered whatever strength she had and gave Felicia hope. Her legs were amputated but her family’s support and her will to pull through helped her recover. After almost 3.5 years, she returned to work.
But that wasn’t enough for her as she wanted to be self-sufficient once again. Her therapist suggested she start playing volleyball again. She joined a team of disabled women and began playing volleyball with them again. That changed her life and, today, she is a proud Paralympian who represents her country at Paralympics games around the world.
She also talked about the importance of reaching out and asking for help. She said that there’s nothing wrong with asking for help and accepting it.
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Haben Girma is a Global Accessibility Leader, and she was recognised as a White House ‘Champion of Change’, Forbes 30 under 30 leader, and a BBC Women of Africa Hero.
She started her speech by talking about President Obama who chose to be inclusive and used a keyboard (Haben could feel what he was typing on her special braille device), instead of talking, to communicate with her. She was impressed with how President Obama accommodated her needs and conversed with her in a way that she understood. He chose, she said, to be inclusive.
Talking of communication, she said that dance is a great way of communicating. She said that she can feel and experience dance through the people she’s dancing with. She stressed the importance of technology and how it can help persons with disability
communicate with each other.
She gave the example of e-mail, which was invented when a deaf couple couldn’t communicate with each other. Today, e-mail has helped the entire world keep in touch. Girma said that technology is one arena that can contribute a lot toward inclusion. At the end, she urged people to take a selfie with her so that she could share it with her community on social media. The audience obliged and made the ASL sign for ‘I love you’ as well. Picture perfect!
[update]
Ferose came on stage and talked about his first meeting with Haben in California. He narrated how he was impressed by her energy, and decided that Haben needed to be a part of IIS.
He asked Haben, Rajdeep, and Priyanka to release the special edition of White Print, a Braille magazine.
Next on stage was Pankajam Sridevi, MD of ANZ, who thanked the volunteers from Allegis, SAP, and ANZ. She also went on to thank all the interpreters and CISCO for helping with the live streaming. She thanked everyone for coming and asked everyone to be back at the sixth edition of IIS next year.
That brings us to the end of India Inclusive Summit 2016. See you again next year!
If you’re interested in learning more about the IIS speakers, watch this space – Team KnowYourStar will be featuring a lot of them soon.
