Poet Nirendranath Chakraborty at the workshop on Thursday. Picture by Pradip Sanyal

Sayomdeb Mukherjee loves to go trekking in the Himalayas, with a little help from family and friends. He?s been up there three times, and has even gone to Brazil for an international conference to talk about his experiences. He is also a prize-winning writer.

But for the student of the Indian Institute of Cerebral Palsy (IICP), the only means of communication is through a computer and an alphabet book.

The wheelchair-bound boy was among five IICP students participating in a two-week creative writing workshop, along with around 15 other students of Class XI and XII from city schools like Mahadevi Birla, St Joseph and Mary?s, North Point, St Augustine?s Day School, Loreto Sealdah and Modernland.

There was also Dipak Ghosh, who took furious notes with his pen tightly clasped between the toes on his right foot. This stunned many of the other participants on the first day, but by the time the workshop ended on Friday, they had learnt to respect his considerable capabilities.

The workshop, organised by IICP in association with the Indian Chamber of Commerce, was held at Modern Academy of Continuing Education, at Modern High School, every weekday for two weeks from 4.30 pm to 6.30 pm. It was the first such ?integration? workshop, but hopefully not the last.

There were sessions on essay and poetry writing, including Bengali poetry, with lecturers like Nirendranath Chakraborty and Joy Goswami. ?We plan to make this a regular thing, with perhaps a six-month diploma course in future, which Jadavpur University has expressed an interest in,? said Iti Sarkar of IICP.

The lecturers, too, learnt a thing or two. ?Joy Goswami was stunned when Dipak asked him why there wasn?t passion in poetry anymore,? said Rima Sen of IICP. ?Later, he said how impressed he was and that if there ever was a workshop like this in future, we were to count him in.?

Nirendranath Chakraborty was amazed, too. ?He was so attentive yet not overbearing, sensitive but not overly so. He started with Plato and Socrates, and immediately had the children hooked,? added Sen.

The workshop was free, and the schools were informed about it by the Chamber. The Jadavpur University collaboration is waiting in the wings at the moment, due to lack of corporate financing. But future workshops will include people with disabilities, to aid integration and make the creative process more ?democratic?.