Apples and Oranges

Photo by Benjamin Wong on Unsplash

“But the disabled ones should bring something special to the table if they expect an opportunity from the recruiters, the point is what do they bring to the table?” I heard a lot of normal people saying this in the recent job fair.

“How are we comparing their destination with others when we aren’t looking at the journeys they have covered to be able to stand in parallel to the normal ones?” I objected in my mind.

The discussion was fruitless as we were coming from different schools of thought and so it culminated in the middle of nowhere.

I recognized two conversations. One that I had with a mother of such a candidate who said “He not only brings what is written in his curriculum vitae but he brings 26 continuous years of my efforts to make him learn how to read, to make him understand what is written, to make him learn how to write and to make him learn how to survive without being able to listen or being privileged enough to speak, he brings 26 lost years of my career as a professor so that I could devote all the time making him a normal human being”.

The second one with another such person who asked “My father has seemingly wasted 28 years of his career’s prime time on my physiotherapy to make me walk and stand, despite being a cerebral palsy patient where I could barely walk, I am made to walk and run from one place to other, forget about the selection, just to get an opportunity to be interviewed, how is my journey shamelessly being compared with others’?”

To both of them, I had no answer, all I could remember was the lines I had read once as quoted: “The great composer Naushad had to struggle a lot in Bombay before he became a signature in the music industry. He used to sleep on the footpath opposite the Broadway cinema at Dadar. And when his legendary movie Baiju Bawra was released in 1952 at the same theatre, as he crossed the road to reach the premiere, he started crying. When producer Vijay Bhatt asked the reason, he looked back at the road and said to him “You know Sir…It took me 16 years to cross this road”.**

Somebody may have taken a lifetime to reach where some of us have reached in half or one-fourth of the duration, doesn’t matter. What matters is that before our brain starts to analyze their destinations, we must make sure we have the right yardstick and the right perspective about their journeys in our mind, otherwise that is where most of the well-researched analyses have a fallacy.

** (an excerpt from the writings of Sandeep Atre, visit sandeepatre.com for elaboration)