A WORLD OF FOUR SENSES, AUTOBIOGRAPHY : Face to Face...
Hello guyz...
This is karann emerge as K PsYcHO on the steemit platform.
I have come again before you with the new blog of mine actually this one is
not mine this one is a autobiography of a man . I have read and collect all the information about it. So if you are taking interest
while reading this then you also can asks the related questions about the stuff which
i going to discuss with you.
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So, Let's start it......
A World of Four Senses
In India as elsewhere every girl or boy has fond and warm memories of his childhood,
from the day he begins to talk to his mother and father in broken syllables. Invariably
a child learns and recognizes the faces of his mother and father, of sisters and
brothers who play with him constantly, or the servants who prepare his meals or
watch him play in the nursery. He must also remember the rich colours of the
butterflies and birds which children everywhere always love to watch with open eyes.
I say must, because when I was three and a half, all these memories were expunged,
and with the prolonged sickness I started living in a world of four senses — that is, a
world in which colours and faces and light and darkness are unknown.If my age and the length of the sickness deprived me of the treasured memories of
sight, they also reduced things which are valued so much in the sighted world to
nothing more than mere words, empty of meaning.
I started living in a universe where
it was not the flood of sunshine streaming through the nursery window or the colours
of the rainbow, a sunset or a full moon that mattered, but the feel of the sun against
the skin, the slow drizzling sound of rain, the feel of the air just before the coming of
the quiet night, the smell of the grass on a warm morning. It was a universe where at
first — but only at first — I made my way fumbling and faltering.
It was good that I lost my sight when I did, because having no memories of seeing,
there was nothing to look back to, nothing to miss. I went blind in November 1937. At
that time we were living in Gujarat, in the province of Punjab in northern India. After
my sickness we moved to Lahore, a few miles away, but the procession of relatives
who came to sympathize made my father ask for another transfer, this time to Karnal,
where we had neither friends nor relatives. There we got a cottage on the canal bank,
built in very peaceful and quiet surroundings.
As might be expected, in the beginning it was tough for all of us — for my mother and
my father, for my three sisters and my brother, and for me, too. The illness had left me
weak. The servants shirked me as though I were an evil eye personified. My sisters
treated me with care, as though I were a fragile doll, and my mother wept. My father,
who was a doctor in the public health service, was grateful that my spine had been
tapped in time, for a delay in the lumbar puncture would have affected my mind or
endangered my life. But he, like the rest, despaired.A state of complete inaction therefore followed my blindness.
In part this was due to
the immediate shock of the illness, but more important still, the impasse was caused
by ignorance of the potentialities of a blind child, since the only blind persons my
parents saw were beggars.My father’s wide medical experience had prepared him for an acceptance of this
tragedy and he understood that any course of action must begin with the
realization that I would be blind for the rest of my life. My mother, on the other
hand, neither would nor could convince herself that my sight would never return;
she did not have the medical experience of my father, and she blamed something
in her past for the tragedy.The family pandit, upon whose advice mother had relied almost from her childhood,
was called in and consulted. “He knows more about religion and science.” Mother
said, with pride, than my other pandit in our province. I was taken before him, and for
a long time I sat in my mother’s lap while he was lost in reflection. After a while, he
took my hand and thoroughly examined the lines. Then he looked at Mother’s and he
studied her forehead, mumbling steadily. He said he found himself inadequate, and
more pandits would have to be consulted. At his request, they were called and
questioned exhaustively as to what atonement could be made. Although their
analyses and remedies differed considerably, they all agreed that by doing penance
for her sins, my mother could improve my chance of regaining sight.Along with this religious counsel was coupled a series of visits to hakims (physicians
who followed the Greek or Unani system of medicine). These quacks prescribed all
types of drops to put in my eyes. The surmas, which were administered at all hours of
the day and night, burned and stung my eyes; and the only soothing part of the
otherwise miserable treatment was the loving caress of Mother afterwards.One night when my mother was administering these eye drops and I was protesting
with loud cries, my father unexpectedly returned. He asked and I told him why I was
crying. He was outraged.He questioned Mother as to how long this had been going on, but she would not
answer him. She was prepared to bear any outburst silently and the longer she
stayed silent, the more irritated my father grew. He said harshly that her
superstitions far surpassed those of any village woman he had ever known. He
went on to say that any person with the slightest consideration for her husband
would have readjusted her ways in ten years of marriage. All his efforts to break
her from her deplorable past had been in vain. He did not want his children
brought up in such a tradition.Even then she did not defend herself. Just as my mother had silently suffered the
verdict of blindness, the self-abasement imposed by the pandit, and the pleading
which preceded the administration of my eye drops, so now she suffered my father’s
anger quietly. He forbade her to make any more visits to the hakims, and strictly
prohibited the purchase of any more surmas. Then he gently lifted me from her arms,
and look me away. With steady hands, he bathed my stinging eyes. After this
incident, even though we stopped going to hakims, now and then applications of
surmas continued until I was eleven. But they were very mild, and my mother always
obtained my consent in advance.I remember other little tests my mother put me through. One day she perceived that
just before I arrived at a closed door I would stop and reach for the handle to open it.
She began letting me go about the house by myself and she discovered that I seldom
ran into things. She credited the hakim and the stinging drops, but every evening she
would hold her hand up before my face and ask me to tell her where it was. She used
to shake her hand before me so that myriads of pores next to, below and above my
ears could feel her hand even when it was a foot away. The air currents helped me to
spot it. But she wasn't satisfied with this. She wanted me to tell her whether the light
was on or off. When I failed this test she was unhappy again, but I soon caught on
and would listen for the click of the switch and then tell her. Sometimes she would flip
the switch very rapidly time and again, and I would always count the clicks and give
her the right answer.
The reason for the conflicting approaches of Mother and Father towards my
blindness lay in each of their backgrounds. My mother had come from a large
middle-class family, and had three sisters and three brothers. She was the eldest
of the sisters and at the time when she came to attend school it was still
customary for even the best-educated women to go only as far as the eighth
grade. Thus her education had ceased with simple arithmetic and Hindi grammar.
From that time until her marriage five years later, she had devoted herself to
cooking, sewing and caring for her younger brothers and sisters. While these
skills trained her to be an excellent mother, they did not prepare her to cope
rationally with an unfamiliar tragedy such as blindness. She found the weapons of
love and affection useless. If she pampered me as her maternal instinct dictated,
my father would scold her; and if she tried to use the medical cures which had
been practiced and handed down from mother to daughter for generations, my father
would forbid their use.Although in my case there was an obstacle which seemed insurmountable, my father
was determined to leave no avenue unexplored. He read all available literature on
blindness. He learned that almost all India’s blind people had turned to begging for
their livelihood, or had become owners of pan and biri shops. He was determined that
this was not going to be the fate of his second son, and he started corresponding
with many of the prominent educational authorities, asking their advice. The replies
were not optimistic. For the blind, educational facilities and personnel were limited,
and often the school became semi-asylums with all ages grouped together in classes
without any gradation system.My father still persisted, for he knew that my staying at home would result in overindulgence.
He realized, as well, that I would have difficulty playing with normal
children, and that my mother would always be afraid to let me leave the
immediate premises.At last he heard of Dr. R.M. Halder, Principal of Dadar School for the Blind in
Bombay. My father wrote to him asking advice. Dr. Haldcr showed unusual
interest in my case, and promised to take special care and personal responsibility
for me if I were sent to his school.When my mother learned of my father's decision to send me to the Dadar
School, she was appalled. She had never been to Bombay, and to her it might
have been a foreign country. She could not understand the reason for sending me
nine hundred miles away from home to attend school with orphans and children
of the poorest classes. After all, another year at home could not but help my
development. Yet she placed her faith in my father's superior judgement, and in
her quiet way she agreed.
Hiii guyz... how are you all...actually I know that it became so.... lengthy to you guyz ......
But believe me i worked hard for this story.
I hope you will appreciate it.....
friends please share your opinions about it..
Thanks to You
K PsYcHO....
@karann
Nice blog bro.....but article is too much big.
Hi @karann, I'm @checky ! While checking the mentions made in this post I found out that @vedmehta doesn't exist on Steem. Maybe you made a typo ?
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