Dilip and Pragna Bhatt were determined to help their blind son lead a normal life. But they found limitations in the teaching aids for the blind. This spurred them to make a revolutionary device that enables the blind to draw.

By Uday Mahurkar

When a child is born blind, many veils of darkness descend. He wanders in a limited world, so many avenues to a normal existence closed for him: he can do this and that, but sometimes not much more. Parents too are often handcuffed by helplessness; they offer love, but at times slip into denial and despair. For a while, this was the story of the Bhatt family in Ahmedabad. Fours years ago when Dilip, 43, a design engineer at the Ahmedabad unit of Space Application Centre, and his wife, Pragna, 41, discovered that their son Nikhunj was born blind, they retreated initially, as so many do, into disbelief.

But the Bhatts did not remain in their cocoon for long. There is a character to them, a resolve to be more than mere concerned spectators. If this was one of life's many tests, they were prepared to pass it. And so Dilip embarked on a quest to train his blind son and put him on par with normal children. Astonishingly -- and there is no other word -- in the process, he ended up making a remarkable invention. A device that allows blind children to draw shapes and understand geometrical designs.

To the seeing man, the value of 'drawing shapes' may not register immediately. He does not see this as some extraordinary gift. To the blind it is; in many ways like a door which opens to another world. Their tool has always been Braille, the coded, dotted script which enables them to read and write. They could understand shapes, but there was no device to help them draw. Now a challenged parent has given that limited world a new boundary. "It's a great discovery. Braille's limitation is that it teaches the blind only the English alphabet. And in that too, they can't write by themselves. But with this aid, a blind man can easily draw graphics and geometrical designs by himself, not just letters," says Dr Bhushan Punani, executive director of the Ahmedabad-based Blind Men's Association (BMA).

To see an invention as simple and commonsensical as this, is to wonder why no one thought of it before. It is constructed out of a series of household objects. A 1 ft by 1 ft slate with a piece of velcro stuck on it. A common ballpen that has fitted on its top a spool with woollen thread rolled on it. The thread, inserted into the pen from the top, travels along the refill and ends exactly at the tip. When a blind person runs the pen across the surface of the velcro pad, as one might over a piece of paper, the thread sticks and forms the shape you want to draw. Pull the thread and it's erased. It is genius of a sort.

As with all discoveries, this one too comes attached with a tale. It began in a classroom with a frustrated student. Pragna, attending courses at the BMA on how to educate and handle a blind child, was finding the learning process extremely difficult. Braille was a nightmare as it works on a mirror-image concept. The dots have to be punched in backwards but read forwards. But more disturbing, she found, was the absence of a mechanism which would enable her son to draw geometrical shapes.

The only methods that existed had limited interactive value. Shapes were cut from cardboard and stuck on paper; threads arranged in particular shapes were gummed to cardboard; paper was perforated with a pin in the form of specific shapes; and sheet metal could be cut in shapes with a pointed tool. In all four the blind learn by running their fingers over the shapes; yet in all four the blind can't create the shapes on their own. There was feel but no creative understanding. Troubled, Pragna turned to her husband. She recalls: "I would virtually struggle to do the homework I was given and repeatedly goad my husband into using his designing brain to develop something that would make the task of teaching the blind easier."

Dilip, who as a design engineer has been associated with making satellites including the recent insat 2-d, responded to the challenge. First he tried stapling the thread on paper, then he experimented with sewing the thread on paper using a pin. However, both ideas, he realised, were cumbersome and had the same limitations as the previous methods. On the third night -- his only time-off to pursue his experiments -- as he struggled on, he was struck by the idea of using velcro. He pulled out a velcro strip from his cupboard and ran a piece of a woollen thread over it. "As the thread stuck on the velcro, my face lit up. I knew I had achieved what I wanted." By the next evening, the entire prototype was ready, Dilip's design sense not requiring much time to develop the unusual sketch pen.

The response has been heartening, much of it due to the BMA's initiative. As Dilip concedes: "It was they who pepped up our spirits when we were totally crestfallen; the discovery is mine, but the inspiration is theirs." Indeed, Punani has already sent the device to blind schools in 22 states. It has also travelled to Thailand and China. Impressed by its efficacy, members of the blind institutes from these countries who were visiting the BMA, carried a few back home. Says J. Kirk Norton, an American expert on multi-disabilities, who visited the BMA: "It is most simple, utility-oriented and cheap. It is set to bring about a silent revolution in the field of teaching aids for the blind." Cost, of course, is one of the primary factors and Dilip's invention is as cheap as they come. After buying velcro, a wooden sheet, a pen, spool and woollen thread, the cost is estimated at a mere Rs 200. And even if the manually-operated pen is replaced with a battery-operated one -- so that the spool can rewind easily -- the increase would be marginal. Now this "sketched pen and velcro slate" -- as Dilip has dubbed it -- has been sent to be patented.

If blind children across the country have occasion to cheer, the boy who sparked off the invention has a smile on his face too. When you question Nikhunj about the device, he beams: "This slate has been specially made for me by my papa." Then with a little help from Dilip and Pragna, he constructs a variety of shapes. Running his fingers deftly across the velcro, he says triumphantly: "That's a square, that's a circle." He is a voyager thrilled with his discovery.

There is a lesson or two beyond the invention though. Nikhunj isn't a child burdened by his handicap. He doesn't sit in the dark corners of his house playing with toys that make strange noises. He is not an object of sympathy. No, to see him now -- recently enrolled in a normal school -- reciting shlokas in the true Brahmin tradition of his family, climbing up and down the stairs of his parents' house with impressive ease and appearing in all senses like every other child -- is to marvel at a family which hasn't allowed his blindness to become a hurdle. Says Arvind Bosmia, a freelance journalist who first came across the new device developed by Dilip: "The discovery part of the Bhatts is, of course, great. But a greater example for parents finding themselves in a similar situation is the way the Bhatts fought the odds at the psychological level and put the tragedy behind them."

In a time of trial they had the will. And eventually they have found their way.

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