New School in the network - Aurangabad

Very happy to share this. Over the last two days - December 24th and 25th, I was at Aurangabad. The brief visit had 2 happy occasions:
1. We took the message of creating an inclusive society to over 100 young students at the MGM Institute. The students were from Class 11, and from classes 7 and 8.


I had so much fun doing this! The students were active and eager. We asked for 6 volunteers for the blind walk, and got 14, with more waiting. The learning was Braille was done with much gusto and the questions at the end were thought provoking. Thank you!


The visit to the blind school was equally good. We saw the basic and clean facilities, understood their requirements and were surprised to see the very low level of audio penetration, even though the students are working towards competitive exams.


The school is now a part of our audio library network and will share requirements.
Special thanks to MGM, and Dr. Aparna Kakkad in particular, for enabling both these interactions.

With the Grade 7 and 8 students, the principal and teachers

Talking about why inclusive spaces are necessary

With the Grade 11 students who asked some very interesting questions

This young lady asked a really interesting question - mam, how do you train them. This is her being trained on getting on stage without stumbling, and walking straight. It was very nice to see her confidence surge when she reached the stage on her own, and turned around to address the audience, all with her eyes closed!

A full house!

The hostel is in a simple, single builing

The school gate

The team after the discussion. MGM has consented to play an active role in the development of the audio library for the school

How to get my patient a free bed in Delhi - www.charitybeds.com

Today, we heard about this awesome initiative that will really help everyone.

All private hospitals in Delhi are duty bound to offer some beds at low or no cost to poor patients.

This is a website that compiles the list of such beds every single morning and makes it available.

If you know anyone who is economically weak and is looking for treatment, please please guide them to this website:

http://charitybeds.com/

They can call Gagan: +91-7838348237
Lalit Kumar: +91-9999071842

And these kindred souls will work to get them a free bed in these hospitals.

November 2018 Roundup

What a lovely November this has been!
In this month, we:
A. Conducted Read Fests at KPMG, Moodys, and SOIL (School of Inspired Leadership)
B. Did a Trust Walk with the German exchange students at The Shri Ram School, Aravali
C. Conducted Blind school visits for the Grade 7 students of The Shri Ram School, Moulasari, to the NAB Center for Women, Hauz Khas
D. Added some more Braille Cards customers, one of whom is a very prominent one.
E. We also visited the Namchi Blind School in South Sikkim to take stock of their learning needs. This is one of the remote schools from which we take requirements for our audio library. We noted the requirements for the next year and also gave them a free resource which they will use every day now - the daily newspaper for children, which is an initiative of our founder. This paper will now be shared with them every day at no cost. The school will use the in built screenreader of Adobe to read out the news to all the children in the assembly. Currently, the teachers have to make the news every morning in Braille and then the children read it out.




The audio content recorded during these Read Fests will particularly help Indian history fans (Original Kautilya Arthashastra in Hindi), and IAS aspirants (All 2018 Mains papers and Prelims papers recorded in audio)


80 files in English, Hindi, Marathi, Punjabi, Bengali, Tamil, Oriya and Malayalam were recorded. These will be a part of the next release, which is due this week.


The Blind School visits almost always make us very happy, because they help us sensitise a lot of children, and the children who walk out of that school truly understand the key words that we stand for - Dignity, Empowerment, and Enablement.


On the technical front, we made the code of the mobile app - CLABIL, more robust, and are working to improve the code even further. We have heated discussions on security for the mobile app, and I love those discussions!


Here's to an equally outstanding December.