A participant at the Best Brailliant Contest at St Xavier’s College on Friday. Picture by Anindya Shankar Ray

A tribute to Helen Keller

To mark the 128 birth anniversary of Hellen Keller, National Association for the Blind along with Calcutta Metropolitan Round Table Number 41 organised the first-ever Best Brailliant Contest on Friday at St Xavier’s College. Over 35 visually-impaired students from 14 institutions, including Jadavpur and Rabindra Bharati University, participated in the final round of the event. The qualifiers were held earlier.

The competition started off with a writing session where students pinned alphabets with the Braille slate and stylus as the secretary of National Association for the Blind, Kanchan Gaba, dictated excerpts from Bengali and English texts. The passages focused on upcoming technological advancements like the Perkins Braille keyboard and how such innovations can help the blind.

In the second half, students read a few lines from an unknown passage. In the writing category, stress was laid on spelling and accuracy while the reading section tested the students’ speed in identifying words correctly.

First-time participant Shila Gure was brimming with enthusiasm. A second-year history student from Vidyanagar College, Gure is a swimming and javelin-throw enthusiast.

“I lost my eyesight at the age of five because of sudden seizures. Since then, I have accepted life as it comes and hope to make it big someday,” she said. For Radha Sarkar and Labonyomoyi Si, both music students from Rabindra Bharati University, Helen Keller is their icon. “We believe in the saying that man is not disabled, but it is the societal environment that disables him. We are trying to learn life skills to be independent,” they said.

A final-year student of Sheoraphooly Netaji Vidya Mandir School, Subhashish Sinha, loves reading in his leisure. “There are many books that I want to read, but they are not available in the Braille script. I hope someone codes more detective novels in Braille,” he adds.

Vice-chancellor of Calcutta University and the chief guest of the event, Suranjan Das promised to open a Braille section in the Calcutta University library for the benefit of the visually-challenged students.

Father Mathews, principal of St Xavier's College, said: “For all the people who can see, the world is not a perfect journey. For those who cannot see, the world needs to adopt a different approach.”

Manimala Sikdar bagged the Best Brailliant Award while Pradip Kumar Sikdar was the first-runners up. The top five were awarded certificates and cash prizes. Ten students were given consolation awards.

Tanmoy Das Lala

THE DIARY

Images in my mind

I stand by the window on an August afternoon,
Watching the rain drops fall into the puddle,
And a drenched beggar runs for shelter,
After a hapless search for alms.
I stand by the window holding a book,
Picturing some word,some thought and a face,
He is an abstraction I can never penetrate,
And the tapping of the
keyboard,ticking of the clock,
The ring of a cellphone,kling klang beep cling,
Break, halt and split the
painted thoughts,
And I shut the window and
go for tea.

Pranamita Roy,
Calcutta University