Through the Looking Glass

When film-maker Dr Indu Bala Singh embarked on a project to capture the lives of the visually impaired, she was little prepared for the lessons that awaited her. “I found that visually impaired people were more confident, positive and empowered than anybody else I had met,” she said, after a screening of the documentary Seeing Through Unseen Eyes at the Central State Library in Sector 17.

The film, made by Singh and her students at the Government College Sector 46 where she teaches English, has the camera following the children of the Blind School in Sector 26. “Students at the Blind School follow a certain route and have a disciplined time table. We had to make sure we don’t interfere with that,” she recalls. The camera brings alive a “normal” life in which students banter as they go through the day, making candles in class or knitting or jiving to the hit song, Rangla Punjab . Adept at using computers, their fingers fly over the keyboard. In other scenes, they are lost in their storybooks in Braille, their fingers moving across the letters as episodes from epics like the Mahabharata and the Ramayana light up their faces. “It’s a misconception that if children are visually impaired, they must be mentally impaired too. Instead, they are the most confident, positive, empowered lot I have come across,” says Singh about the 20-minute-long film. One student says that he wants more books to be translated into Braille while another would like public noticeboards to also carry Braille letterings.