My Days with NAB

When you are in your early teens, you feel like doing wonders in your life. All larger-than-life dreams floating around. A late teenager adds and subtracts some colours in those dreams. Then comes the phase of early twenties where you feel that it’s time to get serious about life. Actually all these phases were more or less hallucinations till you close in and cross 25. Then you have the fire to do something worth, instead of the regular dreams that everyone has. I have more or less gone through all these phases and ended up leaving my home and coming to a distant place to pursue my management studies, which in turn made me understand that life is also about a lot of such dreams which actually makes some sense.

NAB, Worli, Mumbai

NI started my first job with a lot of pre-conceived notions that I had with me during my MBA. It all started fading with each passing day and I started understanding that it is pretty easy to seat in an air-conditioned room and discuss with all the intellects. But it becomes pretty difficult to actually go out and do the field work. When I joined my second job, all I wanted was to explore new aspects of HR. Then came a day when my super boss threw this idea of how to enable ‘blind people and make them industry ready’ to me and how can we help them. He neither gave me a proper plan of action nor any budget. So I had to start with a hardcore ground work where I initiated gathering details of all those places where there is a structured way of blind people being managed. Then I realized that in such high-rate of blindness in our country, we have hardly any organization that maintains a good standard of education for them and make them employable. With such mixed responses, I found one place. A place which we zeroed in on when we were about to give up. It was National Association for the Blind. Based in between some posh apartments of Worli, sea-facing, badly maintained but huge in size.

This is where they get computer basics training at NAB

When I thought that going there, understanding them and shortlisting the final is the toughest task, I realized my job is just half done. When the nine of them came on board, I knew what was lying ahead of me. I had number of sessions with the internal trainers on how to go about the training process. The normal module of training is designed with a 3 month class-room work, but we decided to extend it to 5 months and keep 1 extra month in hand so as to ensure the students will be fully equipped with the required technical knowledge and will be at par with any normal person at work. And the day has come, the first day, first show. It was not as chaotic as I thought, but it surely kept me engaged whole day. We had sketched each minute details of their day to day requirements such as their seating arrangements keeping in mind that they will require the least time to reach to the refreshment rooms! We have trained them how to reach our office from the railways station through the shortest way possible, though they were quite well-versed in travelling in local trains. I mean they need to be followed on how to travel, they are so damn sharp and put effort where it actually is required unlike so many of us who are always on rampage.

We, the humans, are going away from celebrating whatever we have in the quest of having new things every moment. But I learned from them how to live every moment and be happy about whatever comes my way. You will be surprised with the kind of wit they possess and their sense of humor. I never under-estimated them, but never expected that they will come up with some awesome one liners on demand! They also are sensible to people around them, they do emote but not artificially like most of us. For they already have gone through phases where they had accepted a curse being forced on them. You give them an occasion, you give them the smallest possible reason, and they will celebrate it as if it’s their own joy. They do fall in love, they do get rejected and they do have a life with all those events just like any of us.

The primary issue with all of us is that we do not value what we have today. We realize the value of it once we lose it. For these outstandingly dedicated people, life is one beautiful thing out of which they have already lost something, so they do not want to miss the rest of it. They love, they live and they bring life back into dead souls like us who just are running after some pre-defined goals set for everyday life.

These bunch of extraordinarily talented people has made me feel one thing which I may never be able to experience again, it’s that surreal feeling which is literally an out of the world experience. It makes me feel that I am in so much better condition and still not as happy as them, still not as lively as them and still not as dedicated as them.

(There’s so much more I can add in here, I can go on, but may be I can never express what I went through in those six months of the project. It was an assignment carried out by me with great support of by the management of my previous organization. I will always be indebted to Ms. Heartina Mathews (from NAB) & Mr. Shantanu Lajmi (COO – VPT) for their support throughout.)