Persons with disability: They don’t need our ‘ahare!’, the system does

Illustration: TBS

It was the wheelchair that I first noticed. It belonged to a middle-aged man who was looking up at the stairs of a public toilet situated in the Dhanmondi lake area. The coin collector of the toilet looked at him with a smile and said, "You cannot get in there". With a dimmed face, the man turned his wheelchair and left, shaking his head out of frustration. 

"Ahare! Bechara!", a voice emerged right next to me followed by an audible sigh. It was a woman, another spectator of the incident just like me. A physically challenged or disbled person, unable to climb stairs just got rejected by a public toilet coin collector- seems like an incident worthy of consolations. 

But for a moment let's imagine a different scenario. A country whose people are physically impaired, everyone moves with a wheelchair, even the president. So, naturally, when they built the town, in every way they designed it the way that suited them. For instance, as they couldn't stand, they found that it was pointless to have ceilings 10 ft high and 7 ft high doors. So, the ceilings were 6 feet high and the doors were 5 feet tall. 

One day some 6 ft tall able-bodied people arrived to their city and one of the first things they noticed was the height of the doors.

And the reason they noticed it was because they kept hitting their heads against it and began to have bruises on their foreheads. And many of them couldn't stand properly in the rooms as the ceiling was too low for them to stand straight. 

To save them from such miseries, all the doctors, scientists, psychiatrists and social workers came together to find solutions. They made tough helmets and handed them down to the able bodied to be worn at all times. Special braces were also designed which gave them support and relief while they had to bend in their day to day life. But still the standing people were struggling to fit in the land of the physically disabled.

You see, most of the times, individual limitations are not the cause of disability. Rather, it is our inability to consider the needs of people with disabilities when we design a community. Hence, disability of a person is less about the impairment of someone's body and more about how we respond to them.

First of all, there's always a fine line between sympathy and empathy. Sympathy can be defined as showing pity to someone who is lacking something in life or has some sort of limitations. Empathy, on the other hand, can be explained as having an understanding of someone's shortcomings. When it comes to disability, we at large tend to tilt towards sympathy. More often it has been perceived that even if an impaired person has the ability to be independent or has the skills to compete in the so-called normal world, they hear taunts like, "Bechaara wheelchair a bose o kaj korte jai"(Such a poor fellow! he has to go to work on wheelchairs). This is how we see them.  

This particular way of seeing them is often inspired by the way they are shown to us. Often the images and stories of disabilities in films, television, and digital media portray people with disabilities in an inaccurate way which can generate misconceptions about people with disabilities, and cause exclusion. And when I'm saying misconceptions, it's not always the negative things, rather it can also be a glorifying one.

For instance, the last Bangladeshi film that had a character with disability I saw was Alpha (2019), directed by National Film Award-winning director Nasiruddin Yousuff Bacchu. In the film there was a minor blind character called Gondho Jedha who could smell people around him and identify them from a distance. At first glance, it may seem like a better context than a victim or villain-based  stereotype, but this  is still considered as 'supercrip' stereotype that overlooks the lived reality of most people with disabilities who doesn't have any superpower and is fighting the smaller barriers given by the society, sometimes just like climbing a stair.

Although people often sympathise and glorify people with disabilities thinking that they are encouraging the person with a disability, in reality, it actually belittles them. So, when representing them in the media, we should be given the dose of reality, by which I mean we want to see them as working and living in the mainstream, with wide-ranging responsibilities, and not necessarily only overcoming their disabilities to achieve their status. Rather, they can be simply a passionate lover, a responsible parent, a funny teacher or a loving friend.

Hence, next time you read, watch or hear of a story or situation of a person with disabilities and you feel like saying 'ahare!', please remember that by doing so you will be actually creating a barrier that will prevent people from seeing the black and white of their issues. You will be blocking the point that when a person with some sort of disability suffers, he/she/they does not only suffer for his/her/their impairment but also for us and we need to fix that. If everyone was taught sign language at an early age, a deaf-mute person would no longer be treated as a burden. If towns were built and planned keeping in mind that there are people with physical disabilities, there would not be any social stigma attached to it.

Nayan Sayed Jibon. Sketch: TBS

Nayan Sayed Jibon is a content writer at Forethought PR.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and views of The Business Standard.