Learning from Kids - Being unstoppable

This is something I always love. observing kids in what they do and how they learn things. And interestingly , they pick up most of the things from parents (and we wonder "where did u learn that from?"). My son is very good at immitating his mom :-P (some mannerism, speaking etc)

One thing I observed and learnt today is "being unstoppable". Here's how it all went about.

One of his friends at play home had made a paper toy (he calls it scary finger). He wanted another one of the similar kind and asked me to do it. I looked up from my laptop screen and shrugged indicating "I dont know how to do it". what happened next took me by real sweet surprise. My son fishes out his school diary from his bag, ruffles through the pages with a serious look on his face and after some time comes to me holding a page open and says "This is his number (that guy's dad'ss number). call him and ask him" . I was like "waattttt, noo way.. not at 10 in the night". My son almost took the phone and started dialing which is when I sprung into action  of cajoling , convincing. Realising that it did not go through well, I offered to make something else, but he was clear about what he wanted (and something that I did not know to make) ..So, I had to do find means of doing it. Did some reverse engineering on the already done toy and managed to make a similar one. And boy, was he happy to see it?? loved the expression on his face :-)

Bottom line .. when something appears to be urgent, we find one way or other to make it happen. Only thing is most of the things in life are important to us, but not urgent and we keep postponing it till it becomes urgent :-)

Ciao

K

A different world vs a world with a difference

A few days back I was out doing some photography for a project that my wife has taken up. This project is about making basic public services easily accessible for the physically challenged folks. My job was to go around and get pics of the public places that are near to the place where I live.

To give a brief background, even before starting this work I have been associated in empowering the physically challenged folks in one way or other. One instance was when I was a scribe in an examination for a visually-challenged person whom I had not known until the day before his examination. The point I want to make here is that it was not a new thing for me to do this sort of stuff.


Coming back to this project, I started to go around my neighborhood and began capturing pictures of places like parks, school, places of worship,restaurants,public toilets, bus stand and so on.


It took me a good deal of time to go around and in the process visited a number of each type of the above mentioned categories, and it was one eye-opener for me. 


Imagine you going to your favorite restaurant for a meal. The restaurant is on the first floor. There is one small hurdle. There is only one way u can get to the first floor (no stairs, no elevator), a rope which hangs from the first floor. That would probably be the last time you ever went that side (to that restaurant). THAT is the level of accessibility that is available for the physically challenged folks in most of the places that I mentioned. Most of the places have steps, including most of the public parks and places of worship, which is a hindrance to the physically challenged person. Shockingly , some of the smaller health care centers are not equipped with easy access for physically challenged people.

There are rules and policies for each and everything to be  "easy to access" , but most of the times these are on paper. In reality, its a dream come true.

There are lots of organisation doing good amount of work in their best possible capacity. But the need is for more hands to join to make a big difference.


What is the message that we are communicating without saying?? How do all of us look at people with physical challenges?


How would it be to make a difference to atleast 1 specially abled person (if not daily) atleast once a month? it could be doing anything that makes a difference, brings a smile to them.


Jaago!