One Man’s Mission to Lend A Voice to JNU’s Differently Abled

Tejaswi Sharma, who has 69% disability and is a yoga champion, is on a quest to sensitise people about disability.

As a student of Jawaharlal Nehru University, popularly called as JNU, I came to know that someone has taken an initiative to interview all the differently abled students of JNU. I was happy and amazed simultaneously as I heard the experience of one of my friends who was interviewed that day.

My friend asked me, “Hey, why don’t you also give your interview?” I said ok, and few days later I got a call from a person who introduced himself as Tejasvi Sharma, the interviewer.

A day was chosen and I was asked to come to his room in Kaveri Hostel, JNU.

Interviewing the Interviewer

As soon as I entered his room, I was welcomed by this smiling and energetic person who was just making arrangements to take my interview with minimum equipment.

I had all sorts of questions in my mind regarding why he is specifically taking interviews of just differently abled students, what was his intent, how did this idea come to him and what does he intend to achieve through it all.

Some of my questions were immediately answered without him saying a word. I noticed that he is also differently abled. Tejasvi has a Locomotor disability from birth since he is affected by Polio.

I was informed that I was the 23rd disabled student to be interviewed. Before we started, I decided to ask him the rest of the questions.

A Yoga Champion Despite Physical Disability

With every reply of his, I was left more amazed, intrigued and happy. Tejasvi Sharma is currently the ‘most flexible yoga champion’ in the country, despite a 69 percent physical disability. He told me that he has been practising yoga since the age of five and can now perform even the hardest asanas.

He had lost sensation in both his legs since early childhood and the doctors said then that his legs may never function properly. He went on to tell me that he has represented India in numerous yoga competitions internationally and has won many laurels.

I was completely impressed by his feats and achievements, but then again I turned to my basic question, why is he conducting these interviews and how did this idea come to his mind?

He replied by telling me about an experience from about a year ago, when suddenly JNU came into the limelight in the media over the issue of the 9 February incident where it was alleged that anti-national slogans were chanted by some people.

Voice of the Marginalised

Tejasvi said that when JNU was under attack and the entire campus was termed ‘anti-national’, he felt that all the voices from JNU which were coming out, were from ‘able-bodied persons’.

He said that he couldn’t find a single voice of differently abled people from the campus because nobody seemed to have an interest in even listening to their marginalised voices amidst all the noise between ‘nationals’ and ‘anti-nationals’. There, he said, he decided to make these voices heard.

Disabled students don’t constitute a major vote-bank for the political parties in the campus, who in his view are doing very little for them. Be it the issue of implementing 3 percent reservations for people with disabilities in every course of JNU or the issue of dogs attacking blind students in the campus.

How it All Started

I suddenly asked him why it took him so long to start these interviews, considering that the idea was one year old. He said that he didn’t know how to go about it because he had no backing from anyone and that he didn’t know many differently abled students within the campus.

By November 2016, he decided to give it a shot.

“I conducted my first interview with one of my hostel-mates, with my mobile phone, and put it up live on Facebook,” he recalls. When he started to upload the interviews on YouTube with the name ‘Inspiring Stories’, he started getting very good responses, which he didn’t expect at all.

Within few weeks, news started travelling in the campus among the differently abled that such an initiative is being taken. Since then, week after week, Tejasvi has got new interviewees. By now, he has taken more than 50 such interviews.

With regarding to conducting his interviews, Tejasvi is a one man army. Right from searching for new interviewees to convincing them to open up about their personal lives on camera to uploading these interviews, he does everything all by himself. He adds:

I have learnt a lot in the process of conducting these interviews, I have learnt many new facets and aspects of disability, the sad and bad experiences of differently abled students in their lives.

Tejasvi’s Final Goal

Finally, I asked him what he wants to achieve with these interviews. He says that his goal is dual in nature, one is long term, to change the perception and presumptions of people about people with disabilities, while his short-term goal is to sensitise more people within the JNU campus.

The vice-chancellor has backed Tejasvi in his effort as JNU plans to hold a day-long event focussing on the issue of disability where students, faculty members, researchers on disability and eminent disabled personalities are going to grace the event in the last week of this month.

(The writer is a Junior Research Fellow at the Centre for Russian and Central Asian Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University. This is a personal blog and the views expressed above are the author’s own.The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for the same.)