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Conquering ability
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Delhiite George Abraham’s lone resolve has snowballed into a movement, finds SANGEETA BAROOAH PISHAROTY
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Photos: Sandeep Saxena
A shove can move mountains George Abraham with his Score Foundation team
An office without a board. Thankfully, I have the right address to fall back on. But I miss the bell at the gate, and hopelessly go up and down the staircase for a while. Finally, a few hard knocks on the basement door receive a response. “George Abraham, is he in?” Well, he is in, at work when the clock strikes nine every morning, I soon learn.
Settling down on a steel chair, I wait for Abraham, sizing up the hall. A few computers, some chairs strewn around, bare walls, a few hands endlessly tap-tapping on the keyboards with headphones on.
Abraham’s cabin is minimalist too. The walls have framed pictures that catch some exciting moments from cricket matches. You don’t quite recognise the players in them though. At arm’s length from his chair is a rickety cane stand where sit his two landline phones. A laptop, “his lifeline”, with its flap open, is on his work table. Besides the sole tube-light, what brightens up the modest cabin is the high octane “Hi” from Abraham. “We have met before,” he immediately recalls our meeting of over a year ago.
Besides a good memory, a sense of sharp observation is what turned around Abraham’s life forever, back in the ’80s.
“I stumbled across a blind school in Delhi. That changed my life,” he recalls. That day, “I realised what a privileged life I have had because of my aware parents, though I was legally blind since I was 11 months old,” he points out. Having picked up two degrees from Delhi’s St. Stephen’s College, Abraham, a native of Kerala, went on to work in some of the best advertising agencies, first in Mumbai and then in Delhi.
He continues, “That night, I had a chat with my wife about a desire to bring some change into the lives of the visually impaired. Since then I have not looked back.”
He responds with a “no” to whether he has ever regretted what he did. “My wife (a horticulturist) soon started working and I took up freelance work to handle our monthly bills,” he weaves it in. Luckily, he bagged a fellowship that lasted for three years. He was also an Ashoka Foundation fellow.
Two decades have passed since then, and Abraham has many achievements to count today though emphasises, “It is a team effort.” For records’ sake: he is the brain behind the ground-breaking Blind Cricket World Cup which began in India in 1998.
The last World Cup was in Pakistan in 2006. He founded the Score Foundation which among other things has an interactive website that offers information to the visually impaired about everything they might look for. This includes a helpline and a popular radio show too.
His next venture is a talk book project. Says Abraham, “Today, communication is the key. It can change many things, particularly for the visually impaired. We have technology now to meet many needs.” Come October, his team will start work on the project in full throttle.
Volunteers are welcome to record books, which need not be only academic but novels and other kinds of literature. “The books will be formatted in such a manner that the reader would be able to go back to the page he had left.” His aim is also to reach the North East, where there is hardly any facility for the disabled.
Talking about blind cricket, he says he first saw such a match in Dehradun. “I was amazed,” he recounts. It was played with a ball that rattled. Such balls are made in Dehradun and Chennai. Though the initiative has not flowered as he would like it to have, Abraham has not lost hope. “The members will be meeting soon. It has to go beyond India and Pakistan.”
After work, Abraham has other interests – listening to music, reading John Grisham novels and thrillers on the comp, and of course blogging. With a laugh, he adds, “I have two blogs. The one where I write about anything and everything is called georgebhai.blogspot.com, and the other, which has my latest interest — motivational speaking — is georgespeak@wordpress.com” Then of course, he has a four-year-old daughter “who ensures I unwind.”
I leave Abraham convinced that the power of ability is finally a resolve — to conquer it.
( sangeetab@thehindu.co.in
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Metro Plus
Bangalore
Chennai
Coimbatore
Delhi
Hyderabad
Kochi
Madurai
Mangalore
Pondicherry
Tiruchirapalli
Thiruvananthapuram
Vijayawada
Visakhapatnam
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